Legal Aspects of the Shadow Fleet: The Visibility of the Invisible

Roughly one in five oil tankers worldwide now runs dark: false flags, disabled trackers, shell company ownership, all built to move sanctioned Russian, Iranian, and Venezuelan oil past Western sanctions. This paper maps the legal gaps that let the shadow fleet operate. UNCLOS says nothing about disabled tracking or false flags when it defines "non-innocent passage," and flag-of-convenience states like Panama collect registration fees with no real incentive to police the ships flying their colours. When vessels do get caught, sham single-ship ownership means there's often no one left to actually hold accountable. Finland, Belgium, and the US have each seized shadow fleet vessels on different legal theories, and none of them agree. India, now a major buyer of this oil and host to entities running it, can't stay on the sidelines of that argument much longer.