outlaw-ocean Outlaw Ocean: The untold human toll of the fish you eat

Robbing a bank when no one’s looking

Ben Blankenship/Outlaw Ocean Project

Chanklang Kanthong/Greenpeace

A deckhand aboard a Chinese squid vessel is silhouetted against the bright lights as the automated jigs pull squid up from the depths.

Ian Urbina, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Joe Galvin, and Austin Brush are editors at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization focused on investigative stories about issues on the high seas. GLOBE OPINION Editor: Jim Dao; Design: Heather Hopp-Bruce; Digital editor: Rami Abou-Sabe; Audience engagement editor: Karissa Korman; Copy editor: Karen Schlosberg

‘Humanitarian rescue’ of migrants at sea, or the EU’s dirty work?

PART 1

Where the law of the land ends, the story begins

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THREE-PART SERIES / VIDEOS

SIX-PART SERIES WITH PODCASTS

The secretive Libyan prisons swallowing up seafaring migrants; flagrant human rights abuses in China’s massive off-shore fleet; the horrors of a shrimp processing plant in India; and the wild story of a modern-day James Bond — if he were a ship repo man.

Far away from human rights

Part 3

Vanishing protectors and predators

Part 2

The return of an old scourge reveals a deep sickness in the global fishing industry

ARTICLE

Chinese fishing vessels stay at sea for years at a time, forcing their crews to confront severe malnutrition. Americans who eat seafood are implicated too.

Cambodian fishermen recovered from beriberi at a hospital in Thailand in 2016. The crew met internationally accepted definitions of victims of forced labor.

How a maritime repo man infiltrates hostile pirate territory

PART 2

A whistleblower exposes the living nightmare at an Indian shrimp factory compound

PART 3

The brutal, mysterious death on a Chinese fishing ship was hardly unusual

PART 4

The torture of Uyghers behind the fish you eat

PART 5

The video of illegal North Korean workers made global shockwaves

PART 6

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

PART 5

PART 6

Robbing a bank when no one's looking

Part 1

The most important place on earth that virtually no one has ever heard of is called the Saya de Malha Bank, which is among the world’s largest seagrass fields and the planet’s most important carbon sinks,. The bank is mostly located in international waters, where few rules apply, its biodiversity is being systematically decimated by a huge fleet of industrial fishing ships that remain largely unchecked by government oversight.

Fábio Nascimento/The Outlaw Ocean Project

Reporter Ian Urbina climbed aboard a Chinese fishing vessel off the coast of West Africa in 2019 to inspect the living conditions of deckhands.

By buying access to other countries’ territorial waters, China has extended questionable fishing and labor practices around the world.

Taking over from the inside: How China became the superpower of seafood

ARTICLE