We are asked to feel shocked that the IMO has a database of 550 ships that are operating under false flags to which they are not entitled, although one can surmise that there are many others that have not yet flashed up on their systems.
This slow bubbling maritime scandal, which has come to the fore with the so-called “dark fleet”, was the reason for an attempt by the international body to tighten up its regulations and make it harder for this obvious criminality to flourish.
Following a meeting earlier this month, new guidelines and a framework for action have been produced, and it is hoped that these would tighten the regulatory oversight provisions that most will suggest have largely been ineffective in preventing some of the downright ridiculous situations that have arisen.
Why would those on the receiving end of sanctions not be looking for ways to circumvent them, with the increasingly casual and elastic facilities for ship registration providing an easy route?
We now see huge fleets of oceangoing ships suddenly wearing the ensigns and carrying the documents of nations with administrative capabilities for running a couple of time-expired coasters; ships apparently registered in flag states that had no knowledge of any such transaction; and ships that have been purported to wear the ensigns of nations that, after feverish scrutiny of gazetteers and atlases, did not actually exist outside the imaginations of those who were forging the paperwork and whose education failed to teach them much geography.
Why has there been such an explosion of deception in our times, following a period where there seemed to be a reasonable degree of improvement in flag state capabilities, with the MOUs, the US Coast Guard, and the International Chamber of Shipping incentivising quality and competence with their grading systems?
The IMO itself was positively encouraging improvement with its schemes for assisting flag state administrations though technical assistance.
There is no mystery, with wars around the globe and the weaponising of trade through sanctions and embargoes proliferating. Why would those on the receiving end of sanctions not be looking for ways to circumvent them, with the increasingly casual and elastic facilities for ship registration providing an easy route?
As simply set out in Philippe Boisson’s useful compendium on Safety at Sea, "the whole system rests on the concept of nationality, which can be defined as the legal relation between a ship and a state.
"The availability on the ship of papers, the number and nature of which are set by each state, provides proof of that relationship."
Although there has been reconciliation on safety and standards, the very existence of the false flag fleet has once again sharpened old controversies.
He goes on to emphasise that – to limit any abuse of a state’s freedom to authorise ships to fly a flag, the Law of the Sea Convention – no less – requires there to be a “genuine link” between the ship and the state whose nationality it bears, although significantly, it leaves each state to define this concept.
Over the years, this imprecision in the definition has permitted a coach and horses to be driven through the seemingly hard and fast relationships which those formulating the LOS Convention might have had in mind. It has enabled the emergence of the open registers, which themselves might have been useful facilitators of modern ship operations, but have loosened any concept of a genuine link between the controlling minds behind any ship and the state whose flag she flies.
There have been attempts over the years to make the link more genuine, mostly driven by international labour unions that have seen their members conditions scarcely improved by what they saw as a race to the bottom between highly commercial flag of convenience operations.
Any restrictions were fiercely resisted by the proponents for the freedoms that the open registers confer. Although there has been reconciliation on safety and standards, with few suggesting that the large open registers are today anything other than respectable, the very existence of the false flag fleet has once again sharpened old controversies.
It could be suggested that the shipping industry in general would only benefit from a return to the far simpler transparency envisioned in the LOS Convention, which would surely enhance the reputation of an essential international industry, that does not need to be tarred with allegations of money laundering, sanctions evasion, and worse, facilitated by its ridiculous dependence on the brass plate company and links, more tenuous than genuine, between ship and state.