Drama between Flag State and Port State

2012-05-07
 

April,15 marks the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, while remembering the victims who lost their lives at the tragic incident, the entire shipping communities collectively have re-emphasized the great importance of safe ship and navigation.

 

“But new generations of vessels bring fresh challenges and, even today, accidents still occur, reinforcing the need for continual improvement.” said IMO secretary general Koji Sekimizu during his remarks.

 

As we all know, IMO member countries today assume a major part of responsibilities to monitor and ensure the ship safety. Flag States supervise the vessels entered into their registry and Port States inspect the vessels calling their ports.

 

On the table, both Flag state and Port State are talking about how big help their counterpart is and in which way they can work more closely. But off the record, the tensions between the two parties are increasing day by day. It is always flag states super headache of PSC’s unjustified detentions, disputable detention due to the different interpretation of conventions and regulations, and corrupted detentions in less developed ports. From the flag state point of view, the Port State Inspection has become more “restricted” -- detentions are given for even minor case of non-compliance.

 

Those “unreasonable” detentions, which will obviously not substantially make the ship much safer than a more reasonable CODE 16/17, can only result in the massive cost of owner and damage of registry’s reputation.

 

And open registries accounting for more than 60% world’s tonnage are live on reputations. Top registries are working harder to improve fleet quality and to avoid every single detention possible. They want to be at the white list on Paris and Tokyo MoUs and they want to be at top of it. Now that the Paris MoU system marks the PSC performance of the company, not the individual ship, if one ship has more than six detentions, the whole company might slip to substandard in its PSC records. Then there’s a big problem for the registry for the possibility of losing a key client. So more PSC detention cases have been challenged by Flag States which they see as questionable ones for something relative not detain-worthy. The cleaner detention records of a flag state, the easier their marketing for new tonnage.

 

Although there are apparel procedures for both Paris and Tokyo MoU, and even if a flag state with its owner win the support from the MoU’s representative body, the Port State still has its right to remain their initial decision. The Paris and Tokyo MoU have no overriding authority to its member port states, for they are only MoUs. So it is a better way to liaison with the PSC office but not to fight with them before a detention is finally sent to MoUs. This is agreed by Mr.  Gallagher, president of Marshall Islands Registry, by saying “I think the most important thing is communication; port state and flag states talking to each other on a more consistent basis. We work on that, and we would like to get better.”

 

I trust only through smoother communication and deeper cooperation can the shipping society enjoy an “As You Like It” rather than a “Romeo and Juliet” performed by Flag State and Port State.

Source from : www.cnss.com.cn

HEADLINES