The New Inspection Regime of the Paris Mou on Port State Control: Improvement of the System

Abstract

After the Amoco Cadiz ecological disaster in France, in 1978, the Paris Memorandum of Understanding (PMoU) on Port State Control (PSC) was created. The purpose of this harmonized inspection system is to prevent substandard ships that present high risk from sailing to European and Canadian N. Atlantic ports and anchorages. The existence of many substandard ships is a well-known fact and they sail not only in European waters but all over the world; most of these substandard ships are registered in states that are very permissive in respect of regulations of design, construction, equipment, safety, working conditions, etc. The original objective of the PMoU was for each member country to inspect individually 25% of all the foreign merchant ships which enter its ports (specified MoU Ports) to identify the degree of risk. The original inspection regime of this system is going to be replaced by a New Inspection Regime (NIR), agreed in 2009. With this NIR, the PSC Committee aims to inspect all ships, i.e. the inspections will rise from 25% to 100% of foreign ships entering these ports. This New Inspection Regime would classify the ships according to thr ee categories based on the level of risk associated with the ship revealed by the inspection; once classified, that particular ship would be subjected to more or less frequent inspections. This article will focus on two aspects. The first is how this NIR is going to be implemented; that is, what are the techniques and measures that the PMoU countries are going to bring into operation before 1st January 2011. The second is to contribute to improving this NIR. Any complex new convention and procedures are bound to have mistakes, flaws and weak points, therefore the corresponding documents are to be amended by new annexes shortly to be published.