Maritime Law Research
Maritime security and private security
Guillaume Loonis Quélen’s doctoral thesis, Piraterie et gardes armés : l’articulation du droit français avec la Convention du travail maritime, 2006, was defended on 22 November 2019 at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Written in French, its title translates as “Piracy and armed guards: the interplay between French law and the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006”. Supervised by Professor Philippe Delebecque, it was unanimously approved by the examining board. It examines the status of armed guards on board ships, at the crossroads of private security law, maritime labour law and the law of the sea.
He presented these issues to the Union des Avocats Européens (European Lawyers’ Union) in Marseille in 2011 and at the Global Commodities Forum of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva in 2012. In 2016, he addressed them at the annual conference of the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operational Training Centre (NMIOTC).
Piracy and armed robbery at sea
Two publications relate to this work. The first, co-written with Brice Martin-Castex, appeared in French in the Annuaire français de droit international (French Yearbook of International Law), vol. LIV, 2008. It deals with the International Maritime Organization and piracy and armed robbery at sea off the coast of Somalia. The second, arising from a conference held in 2012 by the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM) at the École militaire and the University of La Rochelle, was published in French in 2014 by the Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, in a collective volume edited by Michèle Battesti. It examines the geographical scope of piracy and armed robbery at sea as an element of their definition in international and French law.
Maritime labour
From 2003 to 2006, at the International Labour Organization, he took part in the preparatory work for the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 and the Work in Fishing Convention, 2007.
Working groups
Within the Comité Maritime International (CMI), he is a member, on behalf of the French Maritime Law Association (AFDM), of the International Working Group on Cybercrime in Shipping. In the same capacity, he is also a member of the CMI’s Nuclear Propulsion sub-group. At the 2025 CMI Conference in Tokyo, he took part in the work on autonomous ships. He chairs the AFDM’s standing committee on energy.
Other research themes: space law and civil nuclear law.