London

ON April 11, French commandos went in with guns blazing and captured a gang of pirates who days earlier had hijacked a luxury cruise ship, the Ponant, and held the crew for ransom. This was the French solution to a crime wave that has threatened international shipping off Somalia; those of us who have been on the business end of a pirate’s gun can only applaud their action.

The British government on the other hand, to the incredulity of many in the maritime industry, has taken a curiously pathetic approach to piracy. While the French were flying six of the captured pirates to Paris to face trial, the British Foreign Office issued a directive to the once vaunted Royal Navy not to detain any pirates, because doing so could violate their human rights. British warships patrolling the pirate-infested waters off Somalia were advised that captured pirates could claim asylum in Britain and that those who were returned to Somalia faced beheading for murder or a hand chopped off for theft under Islamic law.

A violation of human rights? In 2007, 433 crew members were either taken hostage, assaulted, injured or killed by pirates. Three seafarers are still missing and presumed dead. According to the International Maritime Bureau, the anti-piracy watchdog of the International Chamber of Commerce, over the past 10 years 3,200 seafarers have been kidnapped, 500 injured and 160 killed.

Modern-day pirates are not like Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp swinging through the rigging, but well-armed militiamen equipped with rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, global positioning systems and high-speed motorboats who have long terrorized the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Aden and literally gotten away with murder. During the week before the French raid, half the pirate attacks in the world occurred in the gulf, a strategic waterway that leads into the Red Sea and thus to the Suez Canal and Europe. Two weeks before the attack on the Ponant, a huge crude-oil carrier  a monster of a ship as long as the Chrysler Building is tall  en route to the Middle East was attacked by pirates firing automatic weapons. The vessel managed to flee.