The Current - At sea, few witness the rampant human rights abuses. This journalist saw them first hand

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

From shore, the ocean looks brilliant, blue and clear. But somewhere out there, pirates, traffickers, slave labourers and migrants navigate the high seas — a place without laws. Ian Urbina shares the incredible stories of squid fishers who haven’t touched solid ground in years and of migrants shot at by Libya’s coastguard in the second season of his podcast The Outlaw Ocean.

There are two kinds of Canadians. Those who feel something when they hear this music. And those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nile Coxall. We are the co-hosts of As It Happens. And every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard hitting, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious news stories.

Also, we have puns. Here Why As It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Each year, more than 50 million people go to work offshore from fishing fleets to the cargo ships that transport most of the world's goods. All of our lives are touched by life on the high seas. Yet we know very little about what happens in the world's

notoriously lawless oceans. That's where my next guest comes in. We're going to move back. We're going to move back. We're going, going, going. They're starting the engine. They're going to pick up this E& Canal. So they're moving off.

One of the voices there is Ian Urbina, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is on a speedboat in the open sea chasing after a Chinese fishing vessel. Ian Urbina leads the Outlaw Ocean Project, a media organization that does painstaking and dangerous reporting on the water around the world. He's also the host of the CBC podcast, The Outlaw Ocean. Season two is out now. Ian Urbina is in Washington, DC. Good morning, Ian. Good morning. So for people who haven't heard season one of the podcast, how would you describe The Outlaw Ocean Project? We're a nonprofit journalism organization. We focus on crimes on the high seas and try to do deep investigations.

You explore so many aspects in this season of what is happening on the ocean. Part of your focus is the fishing fleets run by China. How big a player is China in that industry globally? It's massive. We call it the superpower of seafood. If you look at the metric of how many ships does it have on the high seas, fishing ships, by Chinese estimates, 2,500, by some think tank estimates, 17,000, our number was 6,500. That's over five times bigger than the next

largest fleet. So they are everywhere and in bigger numbers than any other fishing fleet on the planet. In your reporting, you choose to focus on the squid harvesting. You actually go on to a ship and for me one of the incredible moments you're describing, how dirty the ship is, the squid ink everywhere. You say it's like being inside of someone's nose. Why squid harvesting as a focus? We wanted to see a portion of the Chinese fleet that was most opaque, biggest, and most notorious. They're typically very far from shore, and they stay offshore for long periods, two to three years

sometimes. And they rely on foreign labor to a large degree, which also is a risk factor for human rights abuses. And squid fishing produces a product that most people know, calamari. So it's a global product that we're all tied to, for better or for worse, and it's vessels that are famously brutal. So brutal and as you say, opaque.

And then you and your team have this challenge of trying to get at the stories of the People on these ships. We heard that audio a moment ago of you literally chasing after these boats trying to throw a Message in a bottle like a plastic water bottle on board. Why were you doing that? So we went to four main places around the world high seas near near the Falkland Islands, high seas near the Galapagos Islands, the sea border with North Korea, and the coast of West Africa. So separate reporting trips at sea where there were big fleets that we wanted to visit. It takes a long time to get out to the fishing grounds. These are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from shore, so it's a trek out there. Once you get to this weird spot, you have three,

four hundred ships in a 50-mile radius, and your task then is to try to communicate with them. You identify yourself, I'm a journalist, we're not going to be aggressive, we're not here to cause any harm, but we're going to be watching and filming the work you do. We want to tell the world about what this is like. That's day one. You wait for a while, then you get in a fast boat, a smaller skiff, filming drones up, etc. Radio to bridge contact, talking to the captain trying to break the ice.

And then on the third phase is you drop the question and the question is, could we come on board? Normally, eight out of 10, nine out of 10, they say, heck no. Often when you get in that skiff or even when you're approaching in the big ship, the ship bolts, it leaves, it runs, it's scared. It's not normal for a Western ship to come out to those fishing grounds and it makes the captains worried. So they pull up their gear and they run away. And if they run away, then that's when we go to plan B. Plan B is, okay, get in the fast boat and chase them and try to throw bottles on the back deck. It's a very crazy and difficult

thing with low odds, but you have a note in there. The note has a bunch of questions, very basic questions. I'm a journalist just wondering these things. You write it typically in Chinese, bahasa, so that's in the Indonesian because a lot of the crew, especially the deckhands are Indonesian and English. Inside the bottle is rice to weigh it down, a pen, some cigarettes and candy, and the rolled up note and a little buoy kind of styrofoam around the neck. You throw it on the back of the deck if you can, if your arm is working that day and you get lucky and can throw that well. And sometimes the crew will open it up, read it, and write a note back, phone numbers of

family back home, answers to questions, anyone sick, anyone injured, how long you've been, are you being held against your will, etc. And then they put it back in the bottle and they toss it back overboard and you pick it up. It's striking. Listening to you describe it, it's bizarre. I mean, in a way, it's almost perverse, but you're doing your own kind of fishing. Yeah. So we got actually on board a half dozen Chinese vessels around the world. What do

you learn are the subtle things that you as a journalist will know only come by being there, right? They're the things you don't even know to ask. There are also things like, okay, this is a crushing work. I have to imagine. I talked to guys in port and they said they'd not spoken to their family or been on land for two straight years, right? So you can intuit that that's brutal, but to see what that looks like in terms of how soul crushing, you know, sort of the thousand mile stare, the sort

of the malnutrition in the skin tone, the teeth, the kind of furtive glances that help you know, okay, this person doesn't seem like they're safe and they're trying to talk to me, but they're worried about saying anything. Let's target them and see if we can get them when the minder isn't watching us and maybe they'll open up to us which indeed happened You also just see the living conditions the food they eat the bathroom You get a sense for the captain you have to ask questions that they're not gonna answer over the radio because other people can hear you Who's any deaths any beatings?

Still you can't get total candor right you get on board a ship It's not unilaterally. The captain has given you permission, you can't do it otherwise, and he's going to put a minder on you. He's going to put his first mate watching you and sort of overseeing every conversation. So the only time you get potentially total candor about the really thorny questions like abuse is if you can split up as a group, me, the videographer, maybe one other guy, and the minder has to choose who to follow and the other two guys try to go after the folks who

tossed us the furtive glances and see if they'll open up to us in the two minutes you have to try to engage them. And in fact, you do get a sense from these men that some of them truly want to be, they're hoping you'll rescue them. That is how they feel about the circumstances they are in. And the way I think the audience most comes to understand the circumstances that some of these people are living through is through a tragic story of an Indonesian seaman, Daniel Ertanung the textbook character for this line of work. Young kid, graduated from high school in a tiny little town in Indonesia. He had very few prospects where

he lives. He kind of couldn't get a job at the local factory, at the local mart, you know, gas mart. So he just tinkered on his motorcycle and his dad's repair shop and kind of wondered how he was going to make a life for himself. Got rumor of some folks go to sea and thought, why don't we try that made a pact with his best friend, let's give it a go, you know, see the world get out on the water, earn some real money. We've seen a couple guys come back and they seem to be fine and they have enough money to buy a new moped or an ox or a new roof for their mom. Let's roll the dice and give it a go. He does just

that. He ends up on a Chinese squid vessel, boards in Busan, South Korea, off to see he goes. That's when things get real, you know, beatings and malnutrition and 20 hour days and just a sort of slow motion brutality. Ultimately jumped to the end of the story. Daniel gets dropped off 1 a.m., 2 a.m. in the middle of night, literally dumped on the dock in Montevideo, Uruguay. Someone sees him, calls the ambulance.

He's got bruised marks all over him. His feet and hands are horribly swollen from this disease called Barry Barry, which is a malnutrition disease. Ligature marks around his neck. He clearly had a noose of some sort tied around him. Gets taken to the hospital, dies hours later. And so to me, I thought when I got to Uruguay

and began investigating that, that's a touch point for a lot of these Chinese squid vessels. So I wanted to go there. Daniel's story was so compelling that we investigated it deeply. And as you say, emblematic, right? That someone who was perhaps a bit naive about the industry and died, certainly the beriberi,

you say it's an entirely preventable disease because it's linked to malnutrition, the bad conditions on the ships. In exposing this, what impact has it had on Chinese fishing practices? More than I would have expected, honestly. I have low expectations this day and age, but this was part of a big series of a bunch of articles about abuses on the vessels on the water and also on land in the factories, state-sponsored forced labor in the factories. That whole series led to a CEO resigning of hearings in Canada, in the EU over similar issues. A bunch of companies, major brands that sell

at grocery stores decided to sever ties with certain factories and on and on. So the series had unusually large impact and yet probably didn't make a dent. If I'm really honest, China is so big and impenetrable and the Western complicity, Canadian, US, European complicity in it by just buying by way of price and looking the other way by way of ethics. I don't know that the overall market has changed much, but it was a start. Is drinking raw milk safe like RFK Junior suggests? Can you reduce a glucose spike if you eat your food in quote unquote the right order? I'm registered dietitian Abby Sharp. I host

a nutrition myth-busting podcast called Bite Back with Abby Sharp and those are just some of the questions I tackle with qualified experts on my show. On Bite Back, my goal is to help listeners create a pleasurable relationship with food, their body and themselves, which in my opinion is the fundamental secret to good health. Listen to Bite Back wherever you get your podcasts. You also in this season explore a very different aspect of human rights abuses. You look at what happens to migrants, particularly those who go to Libya and try to travel the Mediterranean.

What is it you wanted people to know about what is happening? Yeah, I mean, we're called the outlaw ocean, right? So we're focused on extralegality and illegality happening out there on the waters. And the Mediterranean is a location of a distinctly acute thing. That's a phenomena where rich Western global North countries, Europe, the US, especially Australia too, are basically saying, look, we don't want these people, fill in the blank as to who they are, outsiders coming in here, they're a drag on our economy, et cetera, et cetera. And so we want to block them.

But what's happening is the border where they're getting blocked is moving further outside the actual border, a southernization of borders. So in the case of Europe, you've got all these migrants that are launching from Libya, North Africa, trying to get to Europe and they're crossing the Mediterranean. And what the EU is doing and spearheaded by Italy,

because it's the first landing spot, is they're trying to get other people, in this case the Libyan Coast Guard, to do the dirty work of stopping those people and send them back to jails in Libya. Don't let them ever touch land in Europe. AMT – And you note that the EU's stated intent here is that they are trying to turn these people back for their own safety. It is too dangerous. They want to discourage people from crossing that they don't want this to happen. The EU says it has the safety of these people in mind

They do that is the rhetoric. It's completely Farcically false because if you look at where they're sending them, it's way more dangerous where they are sending these people back to is to Prisons that are run by militias in a failed state called Libya. We're going to play a little bit of audio from the podcast. This is a member of the nonprofit search and rescue organization, SeaWatch, trying to communicate with a Libyan ship that has come alongside a small boat full of migrants. Let's listen. So-called Libyan Coast Guard, so-called Libyan Coast Guard, this is Hotel Bravo, Golf Mike

Mike on Channel 7-2. You are endangering the people. You are getting too close to the case. Over. They're shooting. Yeah, they're shooting. So-called Libyan Coast Guard, please keep more distance. Don't shoot at the people. Keep a distance to the boat. Over.

The Libyan Coast Guard shooting at these migrants. We heard the SeaWatch Observer calling them the so-called Libyan Coast Guard. Help us make sense of what's happening here. As you mentioned, the rhetoric is that the Libyan Coast Guard is doing humanitarian work trying to prevent people from drowning at sea or getting taken advantage of by traffickers. The reality is that the Libyan Coast Guard is doing what they're paid to do by the EU, which is don't let these people get to Europe, bring them back to Libya. And they're doing that with force. So these are arrests. These are not saves.

These are not salvation. So when the Libyan Coast Guard finds these migrant vessels on the water, usually with help of EU planes and drones that spot them first and call on the coordinates, the Libyan Coast Guard goes out and forces the migrants to stop. And they open fire. They cause the ships to stop through making waves onto the boat. Really, really dangerous stuff so that they can force the migrants to stop. They then capture the migrants and they bring them back and they put them in these, in this gulag of prisons. And in the course of your reporting on this, you and your team, you go to Libya to try

to better understand the stories of these migrants and you actually wind up in a detention center, you and your team. What happened? Well, we were doing our job and it angered the government, you know, quite simply. The government is a bunch of different militias. We were investigating one prison in particular called Almabani, and we had spent a week of doing all the things that we told the government we would be doing when we got there, which is visiting, talking with ambassadors, talking with refugees, et cetera. But they were not happy with how effective we were being and how many people we were talking to and where we were going. And so eventually the militia came for us.

The three others who were with me were heading to dinner and they were taken in the middle of an intersection, military trucks, cornered them. Guys get out, they pull the armed security and driver out of their car, beat them in the middle of the intersection, almost to death, grab the reporters, blindfold them, put them in a van and take them to this secret intelligence prison. I was at my hotel room on the phone with my wife, knock at the door, 12 guys come in, guns at my head, hood me, beat me pretty severely, break a couple ribs and do a lot of other damaging things, and then drag me out and also put me in the solitary detention at the prison and held us there until ultimately

through negotiations the State Department convinced the Libyan government to let us out. And was there any question in your mind as this is playing out that your life and the life of your team was in jeopardy when you were in this detention center? Yeah. I mean, the only question in my mind was whether we were going to survive. I thought there was a very good chance that it was only a matter of time that they were going to send us to the South, which is a war zone and sort of sell us off. So it's thanks to the US government and the State Department that we are still alive because I think that was the intention was to use us as political leverage and ultimately kill us.

I'm so sorry that that happened to you and your team and you do talk in the documentary about the perspective that this gives you on what so many migrants go through. Yeah, I mean, I think it feels almost gross to talk about what happened to us because it pales in comparison to what we were reporting on and what happens to literally tens of thousands of migrants. Many of them are raped. Almost all of them are extorted. The beatings that I took were nothing compared to the things that we know happened through footage, through testimony in these prisons.

Hostie Since you did this reporting, El Mabani, the detention center, has closed. But how much of things changed? Dr. David S. Mabani They've changed for the worse. I mean, yeah, El Mabani closed because of the investigation, but it didn't really change much at all. And actually, now you have my, now you have my government under Trump saying,

floating the idea of possibly sending migrants in this country to Libya. And you have sort of other countries that are similarly thinking about the Southernization, the outsourcing of migration control, where you keep people in other countries where there are less access to laws, to lawyers, to journalists, et cetera, so you

don't have to deal with those headaches. This is becoming a much more popular tactic that the global north is using. So truth be told, things have only gotten worse in the big picture. You have been through such incredible and at times terrible circumstances. And I wonder, how do you make sense

when you talk to your family, when you talk to your family, when you talk to your team in your own mind of continuing to take risks to tell these stories? You know, I kind of feel like the more you see, the more you feel like you owe it to what you've seen to keep doing it. So I actually become more captured by the sense of guilt I feel for not doing enough now that I know what's happening is kind of in a dark way what keeps me motivated. I don't know if that's a great fuel source, but it is what it is. And I kind of feel like unhappy, for lack of a better word, when I'm not doing this work. So I keep at it. They are incredible stories. Thank you to you and your team for all that you've done to try to tell them.

Thank you for having me. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.