The Outlaw Ocean Project
The Outlaw Ocean Project is a non-profit journalism organisation based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, labor, and environmental concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water.
More than 50 million people work offshore. Roughly 80 percent of the goods we consume reach us by way of the sea. Half the air we breathe comes from the oceans. And yet, this realm is home to a variety of urgent concerns that go largely overlooked by most news outlets because it is too costly, too dangerous and too time consuming to report on them. These concerns include the murder of stowaways, arms trafficking, illegal fishing, pollution, dumping, drilling and human slavery on fishing ships. The organization was founded and is directed by Ian Urbina, who produced an award-winning series in 2015 in The New York Times and a subsequent best-selling book in 2019.
The Outlaw Ocean Project’s journalism is distinct not just in its focus, but also in how the reporting is conducted and distributed. Most of the stories are reported at least partially at sea. In the United States, the non-profit publishes its stories in various news outlets, including the New Yorker, NBC News, The Atlantic and The Washington Post. The reporting is also translated into a half dozen languages and further disseminated abroad in partnership with dozens of foreign newspapers, magazines, radio and television venues.
To reach a younger and more international audience, the organisation leverages non-news platforms, collaborating with artists to convert the reporting into other forms such as music, animation, mural art, stage performance, and podcast.
Below is a small collection of reports published for you on Portside Review.
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The Whistleblower
IAN URBINA
Farinella, who is softly spoken with a shaved head, neatly trimmed beard and full sleeve of tattoos, was excited about the prospect of living abroad for the first time. True, this would be a high-pressure job, and he would miss Christa, his wife, but he had negotiated a salary of $300,000 a year, more than double what he’d earned at another seafood company in the United States. He joked that he was now the best paid shrimp worker who did not own his own company.
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A Slaughter at Sea, A Grainy Video and Justice Delayed
IAN URBINA
The men are helpless in the open water, clinging to floating debris, tossed by the rolling ocean waves. Several large fishing ships circle. None of the victims have life jackets, but no one makes a move to help. This isn’t a rescue.
A voice, off camera, shouts in Mandarin: “In the front, to the left! What are you doing?” Then: “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
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Thailand’s Sea Slaves: Shackled, Whipped and Beheaded
IAN URBINA
While forced labour exists throughout the world, nowhere is the problem more rampant than in the South China Sea, and especially in the Thai fishing fleet. Tens of thousands of migrants from Cambodia and Myanmar are whispered into Thailand each year to make up a chronic shortfall of mariners. Then, unscrupulous captains buy and sell the men and boys.
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Lawless Ocean: The Link Between Human Rights Abuses and Overfishing
IAN URBINA
There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: Too big to police and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation of the marine life below the surface and the humans working the boats above it.
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‘Sea Slaves’: The Human Misery that Feeds Pets and Livestock
IAN URBINA
SONGKHLA, Thailand — Lang Long’s ordeal began in the back of a truck. After watching his younger siblings go hungry because their family’s rice patch in Cambodia could not provide for everyone, he accepted a trafficker’s offer to travel across the Thai border for a construction job.
It was his chance to start over. But when he arrived, Mr. Long was kept for days by armed men in a room near the port at Samut Prakan, more than a dozen miles southeast of Bangkok.