MPA Visiting Professor Public Lecture @ NTU

The global shipping is organized under international rules and regulations with regard to maritime safety and security. IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) is the maritime safety rule making body since the creation of the IMO in 1959. SOLAS (Safety of Live at Sea) Convention is the most important treaty dealing with maritime safety. With eight sub-committees, the work of MSC covers a full range of safety issues for all kind of ships from ship design, dangerous cargo, safe navigation, fire fighting, communication, to training standards and implementation of the rules and regulations; And from fishing vessels, cargo ships to offshore drilling units and passenger ships. The international maritime safety regulations are indeed continuously modified, improved and strengthened. The recent case of “Costa Concordia” which led 32 people lost their lives triggered hot discussions at the MSC and new some regulatory measures are expected to be discussed and eventually introduced to prevent such incidents from happening again and to improve the general safety performance of passenger ships.

In this lecture, an analysis will be carried out on the participation of the MSC meetings over the last more than 10 years, so as to address the above questions. We would particularly like to examine the participation of Asia in the MSC’s work to see whether or not Asia is under represented at the IMO maritime safety rule making processes and, if it is, to discuss to what extent, what the main reasons are and probably what the possible consequences might be.