Why does it sometimes take a long time for IMO measures to take effect?
The main purpose of IMO is to adopt international treaties which are intended to apply to as many ships as possible. Unanimity of this kind inevitably takes time - it depends on the speed with which Governments act, as well as IMO - and it can only be achieved at all by ensuring that the regulations adopted are very widely acceptable and this can take time.
Parliamentary procedures to ratify the international treaties into national law can take time and this sometimes means that there are inevitably a number of years between adoption of a new treaty and its entry into force.
But IMO can act as rapidly as possible, in response to specific casualties or other circumstances.
Following the Costa Concordia incident, in January 2012, IMO agreed interim operational measures for passenger ships at its Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) meeting six months later, following this up by adopting amendments to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 2013.
Drafting and agreeing new regulations can take time, but in December 2002, IMO adopted a whole suite of maritime security measures - largely in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States, little more than one year earlier.
In December 2003, IMO revised the rules on oil tanker single-hull phase-out, in response to the Prestige incident of 2002.
In another example, following the Estonia disaster of September 1994, in which a passenger ro-ro ferry sank with the loss of more than 900 lives, the then Secretary-General of IMO, Mr. William A. O'Neil, called for a complete review of ro-ro safety to be carried out by a special panel of experts.
The panel's report was considered by the Maritime Safety Committee in May 1995 and amendments to SOLAS were adopted in November 1995. Special requirements concerning the crews of ro-ro passenger ships were included in amendments to the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW), 1978 that were adopted in July 1995. All of this was done before the final report into the disaster had been issued.
A further example is provided by the 1995 amendments to the STCW Convention as a whole. Although IMO had agreed some years ago to amend the Convention, the timetable originally envisaged would have meant that this would not have taken place before 1998 and the amendments themselves would not have entered into force until the next century. In May 1993 the Secretary-General urged the Maritime Safety Committee that this process be accelerated by using special consultants. The Committee agreed and the amendment procedure - which amounted to a complete re-writing of the Convention - was completed by July 1995. As a result the amendments entered into force in February 1997 - more than a year before the amendment conference would have been held under the original timetable.
IMO has improved its procedures over the years to ensure that changes can be introduced more quickly.
One of the most successful of these has been the process known as "tacit acceptance" which has been included in most technical conventions adopted by IMO since the early 1970s. The normal procedure for adopting amendments to an international treaty is by means of "explicit acceptance."
This means that the amendments enter into force so many months after being accepted by a specified number of Parties to the original Convention. The number can be as high as two-thirds and if the parent convention has been accepted by a large number of countries it could mean 80 or more of them having to ratify the amendment before it becomes international law.
Experience has shown that this can take decades to achieve - by which time the amendment itself is likely to be out of date. The tacit acceptance procedure means that amendments - which are nearly always adopted unanimously - enter into force on a set date unless they are specifically rejected by a specified number of countries.
Because of the care taken at IMO conferences to achieve consensus, very few rejections have ever been received and the entry into force period has been steadily reduced. In exceptional cases amendments can enter into force as little a year after being adopted. Apart from the speed, tacit acceptance also means that everyone involved knows exactly when an amendments will enter into force.
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