Visit by Members of the European Parliament to IMO

Speech by Efthimios E. Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization, IMO Headquarters, 11 May 2006

Ladies and gentlemen, Members of the European Parliament,

Let me begin by welcoming you to IMO and by offering my thanks to Mr. Dirk Sterckx, chairman of the Maritime Affairs subgroup of the European Parliament's Intergroup on Sustainable Development and Conservation, whose initiative this visit has been, and to Mr. Peter Swift of INTERTANKO and the maritime industry's "Intergroup" of shipping organizations, who have also been instrumental in organizing your visit. My colleagues and I are delighted to have you here and welcome this occasion as an opportunity for both sides to know each other better and build on relations.

It has been suggested that I speak to you today about how IMO works, which I will be happy to do. If I start from very first principles, I hope you will forgive me if perhaps I cover some ground that is already familiar to you. So let's get the basic details out of the way first. IMO is a specialized agency of the United Nations - the only one, incidentally, that is headquartered in the United Kingdom. The Convention by which it was founded was adopted in Geneva in 1948 and the Organization actually came into being 10 years later, once the Convention had been ratified by enough Governments to meet its entry into force criteria. Today, IMO has 166 Member States and three Associate Members and a host of intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations also participate actively in its work.

Our mission statement is "Safe, Secure and Efficient Shipping on Clean Oceans" and, like all good mission statements, it reflects a simple enough sentiment behind which lies a detailed, multi-faceted and sometimes complex structure designed with the sole purpose of achieving those ends.

Shipping is perhaps the most international of all the world's great industries. The ownership and management chain surrounding any particular vessel can embrace many different countries; it is not unusual to find that the owners, operators, shippers, charterers, insurers and the classification society, not to mention the officers and crew, are all of different nationalities and that none of these is from the country whose flag flies at the ship's stern. In which other sector of human activity, may I ask, can one meet a businessman who has his headquarters in one country (say Greece), draws capital from another country (say Britain), signs a contract for the building of a ship in a third country (say Japan), registers that ship in a fourth country (say Panama), charters it bareboat to an operator from a fifth country (say Germany), who uses as manager a company from a sixth country (say Singapore), which, in turn, recruits the crew from a seventh country (say the Philippines) before it starts operating the ship between an eighth country (say Brazil) and a ninth country (say Australia)? The ship may be classed with a classification society in a tenth country (say Norway), insured in an eleventh country (say the United States) and have its accounts managed in a twelfth country (say India). Moreover, ships themselves spend their economic lifetimes moving between different legal jurisdictions, very often far away from the country of their registry, as they carry the raw materials, goods and products that underpin today's burgeoning global economy.

There is, therefore, an over-arching logic in favour of a framework of international standards to regulate shipping - standards, which can be adopted and accepted by all. Without internationally recognized and accepted standards, you might have the ludicrous situation that a ship leaves country A bound with cargo for country B, fully compliant with country A's requirements for ship design, construction, equipment, manning and operation, only to find that country B has its own, different requirements. Clearly there has to be a common approach, so that ships can ply their trade around the world and countries receiving foreign ships can be confident that, in accepting them, they do not place their safety, security and environmental integrity at an unreasonable risk.

The first attempts at such a common approach date back to well before the formation of IMO. From the mid-19th century onwards, a number of international maritime agreements were adopted. A treaty of 1863, for example, introduced certain common navigational procedures that ships should follow, when encountering each other at sea, so as to avoid collision, and this was signed by some 30 countries. And the infamous Titanic disaster of 1912 spawned the first Safety of Life at Sea - or SOLAS - Convention, which, albeit completely modified and updated, and nowadays within the responsibility of IMO, is still the most important international instrument addressing maritime safety today.

But it was not until the establishment of IMO that there was a recognized, international body to address such concerns. Since its formation, IMO's main task has been to develop and maintain a comprehensive regulatory framework for international shipping. Its mandate was originally limited to safety-related issues, but subsequently its remit has expanded to embrace environmental considerations, legal matters, technical co-operation, issues that affect the overall efficiency of shipping - such as how to deal with stowaways or how a cargo manifest should be transmitted to the authorities ashore - piracy and armed robbery against ships and, most recently, maritime security.

When an IMO meeting is taking place in this building, our Member Governments, together with the IGOs and NGOs, send their maritime experts to assist our highly specialized technical committees and sub-committees, each with its own well-defined agenda. As you yourselves do in Brussels or Strasbourg, our delegates will sit together, typically for a week or more at a time, to thrash out issues, usually of a technical or legal nature, that affect international shipping. To anyone outside of shipping, much (although by no means all) of this work is rather arcane and of little, direct interest. But, within the context of shipping, it can have huge implications. It may not matter a great deal to the man or woman in the street that, for example, a whole raft of amendments to the SOLAS Convention will enter into force in July of this year but, as I am sure you can imagine, it has considerable repercussions within the shipping industry, where ships may have to fit new equipment or adopt new procedures in order to comply with the new requirements, not to mention the measures the flag and port States will also have to take. Overall, the result should be another positive step on the continuing path towards the IMO mission statement that I mentioned earlier.

The direct output of IMO's regulatory work is a wide-ranging body of international conventions, supported by literally hundreds of guidelines and recommendations that, between them, govern just about every facet of the shipping industry - from the drawing board to the scrap yard. If you are operating an oil tanker and need to be sure exactly what items must be entered in the oil record book, you will find that in the MARPOL Convention. If you are hiring crew members and want to be sure their qualifications are worth the paper they're written on - there's another IMO convention, the STCW, that covers that. If you are designing a containership and want to know what sort of electrical cables and wiring you should allow for, you'll find that in SOLAS.

It is impossible to generalize with complete accuracy but, broadly speaking, IMO measures fall into three categories. There are those aimed primarily at the prevention of accidents, casualties and environmental damage from ships in the first place. In this group you will find conventions setting standards for ship design, construction, equipment, operation and manning. Then there is a series of measures which recognize that accidents do happen, despite the best efforts of all concerned, and which, therefore, try to mitigate their negative effects. Rules concerning distress and safety communications, the provision of search and rescue facilities and oil spill clean-up and response mechanisms, all fall into this category. The final group is concerned with the aftermath of accidents, and, in particular, with establishing mechanisms to ensure that those who suffer the consequences of an accident - for example, passengers of the victims of pollution incidents - can be compensated adequately and, hopefully, expeditiously.

Although founded as a strictly technical body, there is no doubt that the political and economic dimensions of the Organization's work are becoming increasingly influential and we are adapting and changing accordingly. By comparison with many other UN agencies, IMO is compact. We have a staff of around 300 at the London Headquarters, drawn from over 65 different nationalities, and small regional offices in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya and the Philippines.

Although we do not have a large field presence, the Organization as a whole does recognize that not all of its Members have an equal ability to implement the measures they agree to here. Some lack resources, some lack expertise, some both. To this end, we have established an extensive technical co-operation programme, through which we can identify the particular maritime development needs of Member countries and match them to offers of help and assistance from those that are better off. Typically, this might involve arranging training, workshops and seminars on particular subjects at national or regional level. We have also founded three educational establishments in Malmö, Malta and Trieste, which are designed principally to offer advanced level education in specialized maritime subjects to students from developing countries, although nationals of developed countries are also attending them.

The list of shipping-related topics that fall under the aegis of IMO is huge. It is almost a case of "you name it, we deal with it." But there are, of course, some things that we are not. We are not, for example, a police force; we don't have the mandate or the capacity to put teams of inspectors aboard ships and check their compliance with international standards. We are not "operational" in the sense that we ourselves cannot respond to incidents and accidents at sea, such as groundings, collisions, explosions, etc., on a 24-hour basis. And we are not a court; there is an International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, in Hamburg, but this is established under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which is not an IMO Convention. Also, we do not get involved with issues such as the delimitation of territorial waters, EEZs or fishing rights. Again, these are regulated by UNCLOS and fall within the remit of other international organizations.

Ladies and gentlemen, I trust that what I have been able to tell you so far has given you sufficient insight into the way we operate and the kind of things we do. You will already have seen during your visit today, the Maritime Safety Committee in action and this provides an excellent example of how the Organization works. More than 600 maritime experts, representing around 100 or more Members States, are engaged this week and next in intense debate concerning actual regulations for the shipping industry. This is a truly global mechanism that draws on the finest expertise on technical aspects of shipping available anywhere on the planet today.

I could speak to you for hours about the detailed workings of IMO and the many different topics we cover in our work - but don't worry, I will not!

However, to understand the proper significance of IMO, the Organization's work needs to be seen in the context of the international shipping industry that it serves to regulate, and I would like to turn to that subject now for a few moments.

Of all the sectors that make up the global transport infrastructure, shipping probably has the lowest public profile and the least representative public image. In the developed world, most people are familiar with the rituals and the frustrations of air travel; railway trains not only cross vast empty plains but also rattle through busy cities and suburban towns; and the lorries, cars and vans that crowd onto the road network are simply a part of everyday life. By contrast, most people never encounter a ship, except perhaps for the occasional trip on a ferry. Even in the case of coastal cities or long-established river ports like London, as ships grew exponentially in size, the latter half of the 20th century witnessed a migration of maritime traffic from traditional port areas to purpose-built, dedicated sites away from the main centres of population. To all intents and purposes, shipping became, and remains, "out of sight and out of mind" to a large proportion of the population.

Yet, if you look around you, almost everything you see has been touched by shipping in some way. Raw materials, component parts, finished goods, fuel and foodstuffs are all moved around the world by ships. Shipping carries more than 90 per cent of world trade, largely because ships enjoy unrivalled superiority over all other modes of transport when it comes to carrying massive quantities of cargo cost-effectively, cleanly, securely and safely.

I remember once surprising some students from Oxford University who had invited me to speak there when I told them about some of the realities of shipping today. They certainly had some of their pre-conceptions shattered when I pointed out to them that they were far more likely to find the ship being controlled by a single joystick and a mouse-ball in the arm of the helmsman's seat than a horny-handed bosun grappling with a spoked wheel; that the chief engineer would probably have clean hands and the calluses on his or her fingers would be from tapping a keyboard rather than wielding a spanner; that the crew accommodation would likely be clean, light and airy, the food good and they might well find the first officer exchanging emails with his family at home via the satellite communication system. It came as an eye-opener to them to learn that the magnificent ships of today are modern, technologically-advanced workplaces and I was proud to be able to inform them that the work of IMO has played, and continues to play, an important part in shaping that environment.

The development of shipping and the establishment of a global system of trade have moved forward together, hand-in-hand. Shipping has always provided the only really cost-effective method of bulk transport over any great distance. Those with access to natural resources; those with the ability to convert those resources into useful products for the good of mankind; and those with a requirement and the wherewithal to utilize and consume those end products are all joined by the common thread of shipping. The eternal triangle of producers, manufacturers and markets are brought together through ships and the sea. This has always been the case and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

There can be no doubt that transport and communication are crucial for sustainable development in the global environment. If the benefits of globalization are to be evenly spread, all countries must be able to play a full and active part in the distribution system and build strong transport infrastructures. And, if they are to succeed, they must do this by working together in a spirit of international co-operation. Their active participation in IMO is one of the best ways in which they can do this.

So, ladies and gentlemen, to conclude: over the years IMO has evolved to meet changing conditions and requirements. In its early days it concentrated on formulating international conventions and codes. Today, however, IMO is just as concerned to ensure that the conventions, codes and other instruments already adopted are effectively enforced and implemented. We have introduced a voluntary audit scheme for our Member States, which will enable the Organization to gauge just how effectively each country is implementing the global standards it has signed up to. Where implementation difficulties are identified, these will be addressed through our technical co-operation programme and any lessons learned will be shared with all Member States so that all may benefit.

There is significant and growing evidence that our measures have already proved beneficial in many areas. Oil pollution of the sea, for example, is less of a threat now than it was 20 years ago and the number of collisions between ships has been greatly reduced in areas where IMO-approved traffic separation schemes have been introduced.

But nobody can afford to be complacent and while we continue to promote more effective, uniform and global implementation and enforcement of the IMO standards, we will be concentrating equally on improving such factors as management and training. For there is also a great deal of evidence to suggest that most maritime accidents happen not because the international regulations adopted by IMO are somehow defective, but because people - aboard and ashore - do not always observe them. So, quality management and quality operation will always require quality training and this is something to which, I am sure, all those concerned with the regulation of shipping, now and in the future, would do well to pay heed.

Ladies and gentlemen,
Thank you.

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