Crimes with a Maritime Component

As with drug-trafficking and migrant smuggling, human trafficking tends to be a chain of events invariably beginning and ending on land, often not entailing a maritime component at all. Even migrant smuggling by sea generally occurs as part of a wider smuggling process often involving land and/or air movements. For these reasons, it is suggested that neither human trafficking nor human smuggling should be considered a 'maritime crime' as such. Still, they do respond to the criteria of 'crimes in the maritime domain'. Therefore they are grouped in a subgroup that is distinct from the one of 'maritime crime,' 'crimes with a maritime component.' The reason for doing so would not only be that naval forces are occupied with the fight against human trafficking and human smuggling at sea, but also and more importantly, that much of the suffering of the victims occurs at sea and that most casualties occur within the maritime domain. All 'crimes with a maritime component' can be thought of as international in that they are of a transnational or multi-jurisdictional nature, but they are not all international crimes, hence the use of the more general term.