sparky wrote:.
Moscow has had a consistent attitude putting their national law above any international body
unless it has been agreed beforehand.
"you can't just go seizing another nation's flagged ship and claim piracy"
Yes you can , piracy , weapon smuggling and slaving , even on suspicion are ground for the countries to intercept ,
search , seize and arrest .
there is precedent for a country arresting people on board a neutral vessel
see the Trent incident for example
recently a presidential plane ( deemed a ship in international law ) was forced down
and searched looking for Snowden
As for going to jail , I've said it before ,
once condemned in a Russian court of law , you are taken out of remand jail and given to the carceral system
everybody go tho work camps , there is six different grades ,women usually sew uniforms , men chop wood
the camps range from light and easy , close to home ,
to hard remote camps full of really tough criminals with tough guards on top .
there is some exception such as the White swan penitentiary , for the really hard and difficult "tigers"
it's reported as extreme , even by Russian standard .
Thanks, sparky, for reminding some of the chest thumping chauvinists what the deal is. It's OK for the US to ground an aircraft because Snowden, a whistleblower, might have been on it, but it's not OK for Russia to arrest a bunch of vandals who engaged in repeated harassment, endangerment and trespass on a Russian oil rig working in Russia's EEZ.
Let's see this BS kangaroo tribunal enforce its "law" on Russia. It is nothing more than a propaganda exercise. Maybe the US navy can accompany Greenpeace ships when they disrupt Russian oil and gas rig operations. Apparently, we have a collection of clowns here who think they are dealing with a banana republic that somehow must bend to their capricious desires. No, you will have to live with Russian law and the consequences of it for idiots like the Greenpeace crew.
Russia should set the logical precedent: oil and gas rigs operating in the EEZ are de facto sovereign territory of the country operating them. Hence they have a 12 nautical mile (let's be generous and make that 7 nautical mile) territorial waters zone around them. The whole "international waters" claim is so much self-serving crap. The definition of piracy is when you maliciously interfere with the passage of a ship on the open sea in "international waters". You don't get to do what you want in "international waters".