In his New Year’s message, inaugurating 2010 as the Year of the Seafarer, Admiral Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), identified three goals for the year:
Continue reading
“It is a sad indicator that there is a need to introduce a Maritime Labour Convention that, in the main, deals with the basic employment rights of a seafarer and his living conditions on board. Is that as far as we have come......” Captain Robert Ferguson, of Gulf Energy Maritime, who wrote these words in the
latest Nautical Institute’s International Maritime Human Element Bulletin Alert! probably makes many of his readers feel a little uncomfortable.
He points out that if a shipowner wants to sleep well at night and not worry about what on earth might be happening to his ship, it is attention to the human element that will provide this satisfying slumber.
He suggests that changes are needed to the way that seafarers are regarded by their employers, and…
Continue reading
After several thousand years of training seafarers, one would think that mankind had some sort of a system in mind. Surprisingly, there is no formal training-at-sea system.
Continue reading
In his message to the world’s seafarers, dedicating the year 2010 as the “Year of the Seafarer,” Efthimios Mitropoulos, Secretary-General of the IMO, points out that it is the crew of each ship that makes world trade possible, and that 1.5m seafarers serve the daily needs of more than 6.5 billion human beings.
Continue reading
IMO ‘will lead emissions plan’ says the
headline and it’s good without necessarily being right.
A newspaper sub-editor is more often than not a writer’s conscience and in this case, Alfons (not Alfred) Guinier of the European Community Shipowners Association is merely expressing his optimistic hope that IMO retains control of the post-Copenhagen GHG process.
We had all better hope he is correct. This is not because of the hysteria that surrounded the conference but because of the accord that resulted. While too many people were focussing on what the accord wasn’t – or why it shouldn’t have been at all – not enough were looking at what it is and what it might mean.
Even for such a skimpy document, looked…
Continue reading
As I was sitting in the back of the main conference room at IMO two weeks ago, a fellow delegate leaned over and said; “Every so often, something happens here that is really important.”
Continue reading
During the IMO assembly meeting last month, Secretary-General Mitropoulos made a plea for uniform solutions, arrived at internationally, through a process of collective agreement. In the field of oil pollution legislation – always politically sensitive – this is perhaps wishful thinking. Particularly in the United States.
Continue reading
THE ratification of the Lisbon Treaty has given the European Union the clearest and strongest signal of its own importance in the world in its history. It has coincidently acted as a
spur to its ambitions vis-a-vis the maritime industry.
« go back