Kshitij Saruparia and Apeksha Kachhawaha
On 5 July 2026, five months after the Indian Coast Guard intercepted the tankers Stellar Ruby, Asphalt Star and Al Jafzia roughly one hundred nautical miles west of Mumbai, a monsoon storm nearly finished what the seizure started. All three vessels dragged anchor. The Al Jafzia, left unmanned after an earlier court order removed its crew, ran aground off Manori beach. The Coast Guard scrambled an emergency towing vessel and a pollution control ship to prevent what would have been the third significant consequence of a seizure whose legal basis, as we argued in the previous post, cannot be reconciled with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The government’s position on the tankers has run, since February, on five separate statutes and through three procedural tracks, none of which has needed to say a word about the exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Marine Insight reports that the Coast Guard registered cases against the shipowners under five legislations – the Customs Act, the Petroleum Act, the Essential Commodities Act, the Information Technology Act, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Yellow Gate police filed a first information report on 15 February naming the alleged controlling owner and crew from each vessel as accused in a smuggling case. A separate proceeding sent the Asphalt Star’s master and second officer into judicial custody. By May, the Bombay High Court had ordered the Al Jafzia moved to the Alang shipbreaking yard for scrapping, while the Asphalt Star and Stellar Ruby remained in custody with the investigation still open. On 6 May, hearing a habeas corpus petition from seven crew members, Justices Ravindra Ghuge and Hiten Venegaonkar ordered the release of fifty seafarers after learning they had survived only on three hundred millilitres of water a day, a ration the bench compared unfavourably to what most households give their pets. The bench was explicit about what it was and was not deciding as it noted that “(w)e are not concerned with your ship and vessels,” it told the owners’ counsel. The scope of a habeas corpus petition, the court said, is the protection of liberty and life, not the resolution of commercial maritime disputes.
By July the facts became a bit clearer. Investigations pointed towards a registry fraud. The Asphalt Star had falsely claimed that it was registered in Mali. Similarly, Al Jafzia had cycled through similar false claims to registry in Eswatini, Aruba, Guyana and finally in Nicaragua since 2024. The proceedings against them is of domestic nature and claims are based on domestic laws. The jurisdictional questions we discussed in the previous post – whether India had any UNCLOS basis to board these ships one hundred nautical miles from its coast – has not come up once before the courts yet. One reason for this gap could be that India has avoided the international law question.
India is a dualist state. Its international obligations under UNCLOS and its domestic statutory powers are not the same inquiry, and Indian courts do not automatically treat the first as a precondition for exercising the second. The Maritime Zones Act, 1976 asserts India’s own claims over its EEZ as a matter of domestic law, and the Customs Act’s extraterritorial provisions, along with the Petroleum Act, the Essential Commodities Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita now in play here, operate on their own statutory terms once a court has custody of the accused and the vessel. None of these domestic powers derive their validity from UNCLOS. A magistrate remanding the Asphalt Star’s officers into judicial custody applies the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita’s provisions on the facts before the court. Nothing in that statute asks the magistrate to first confirm that Article 33 or Article 56 of UNCLOS authorised the underlying interception. If the interception was in fact unlawful under international law, that is a separate legal fact, one that exists whether or not any Indian court has occasion to notice it.
The Bombay High Court has already clarified what the habeas corpus proceeding was for. The bench that ordered the crew’s released on 6 May was answering a narrow question – whether the fifty crew members were being unlawfully deprived of water and liberty, and if so, what relief followed. It had no occasion to ask whether the Coast Guard’s original boarding complied with UNCLOS, because that detention was not challenged by the seafarers. They were instead challenging their treatment aboard vessels already in Indian custody, not the lawfulness of how that custody arose, and the court said as much when it told the owners it was not concerned with the ships. A remand order works the same way, for a different reason. A magistrate deciding whether to extend judicial custody under the criminal provisions in play is answering a question about the sufficiency of the case for continued detention, not adjudicating the interceptor’s compliance with a treaty India has ratified. Both proceedings did exactly what they were built to do. Neither was built to reach the EEZ question, and expecting either to have reached it mistakes the proceeding’s design for a gap in the government’s argument.
Where the UNCLOS question could surface is uncertain. The vessel owners have a petition before the Bombay High Court, the same forum that has already ruled twice on crew welfare and vessel disposal. If that petition, or the pending smuggling prosecution itself, ever turns to the lawfulness of the original interception rather than what has happened to the ships and crew since, the jurisdictional mismatch we have identified becomes available as a defence the accused would have to raise and prove, not a threshold the prosecution must clear before it can proceed. Nothing so far in the public record indicates that argument has been made. That may be a strategic choice by counsel weighing which arguments to prioritise, or it may reflect that Indian courts, applying the Maritime Zones Act and the Customs Act as domestic statutes, would not find a UNCLOS defect dispositive even if raised, since the coastal state’s international law obligations and its power to prosecute under its own statutes are not, in Indian practice, treated as conditions on each other.
That last possibility deserves to be stated as a live one rather than assumed away. Even if one were to rely completely on our jurisdictional argument made in the previous piece, an Indian court hearing the smuggling prosecution could still decide it has no occasion to consider it. Courts frequently resolve cases on the narrowest available ground, and holding the accused under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for conduct occurring in the vicinity of India’s EEZ is a narrower and more familiar ground than resolving an unsettled question of treaty interpretation. If that is what happens, and on the pattern of the last five months it is the likelier outcome, the UNCLOS mismatch will remain true as a matter of international law without ever becoming legally operative inside India. The ships and their officers will most likely be dealt with and prosecuted or released entirely on India’s domestic laws.
That outcome would not vindicate India’s original press release. It would, instead, demonstrate how a coastal state can act on a jurisdictional basis that potentially violates an international treaty, and still complete an entire prosecution, from FIR to judicial custody to habeas corpus to vessel disposal, without a domestic court ever being asked to adjudge the legality of that action as per the relevant international law. We have demonstrated the gap between what UNCLOS permits and what India did. Whether it ever becomes more than an academic observation depends entirely on whether the vessel owners’ counsel deem it as a relevant factor.
(This is second part of a Guest-Post by Kshitij Saruparia and Apeksha Kachhawaha. Read the first post here. Apeksha is an incoming Associate at ASV Legal LLP. She graduated from Maharashtra National Law University, Nagpur in 2026. Kshitij is an Advocate practicing at Rajasthan High Court. He graduated from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad in 2026.)
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