(1)

Council Directive 94/57/EC of 22 November 1994 on common rules and standards for ship inspection and survey organisations and for the relevant activities of maritime administrations (4) has been significantly amended on several occasions. Since further amendments are to be made, it should be recast in the interests of clarity.

(2)

In view of the nature of the provisions of Directive 94/57/EC it seems appropriate that its provisions be recast in two different Community legal instruments, namely a Directive and a Regulation.

(3)

In its Resolution of 8 June 1993 on a common policy on safe seas (5), the Council set the objective of removing all substandard vessels from Community waters and gave priority to Community action designed to secure the effective and uniform implementation of international rules by drawing up common standards for classification societies , defined as ship inspection and survey organisations (hereinafter ‘recognised organisations’) .

(4)

Safety and pollution prevention at sea may be effectively enhanced by strictly applying international conventions, codes and resolutions while furthering the objective of freedom to provide services.

(5)

The control of compliance of ships with the uniform international standards for safety and prevention of pollution of the seas is the responsibility of flag and port States.

(6)

Member States are responsible for the issuing of international certificates for safety and the prevention of pollution provided for under conventions such as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea of 1 November 1974 (SOLAS 74), the International Convention on Load Lines of 5 April 1966 and the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships of 2 November 1973 (Marpol), and for the implementation of those conventions.

(7)

In compliance with such conventions all Member States may authorise to a varying extent recognised organisations for the certification of such compliance and may delegate the issue of the relevant certificates for safety and the prevention of pollution.

(8)

Worldwide a large number of the existing recognised organisations do not ensure either adequate implementation of the rules or the necessary reliability when acting on behalf of national administrations as they do not have ▐ adequate structures and experience to enable them to carry out their tasks in a highly professional manner.

(9)

In addition, these recognised organisations produce and implement rules for the design, construction, maintenance and inspection of ships and they are responsible for inspecting ships on behalf of the flag States and certifying that those ships meet the requirements of the international conventions for the issue of the relevant certificates. To enable them to carry out that duty in a satisfactory manner they need to have strict independence, highly specialised technical competence and rigorous quality management.

(10)

Recognised organisations should be able to offer their services throughout the Community and compete with each other while providing equal levels of safety and of environmental protection. The necessary professional standards for their activities should therefore be uniformly established and applied across the Community.

(11)

The issue of the cargo ship safety radio certificate may be entrusted to private bodies having sufficient expertise and qualified personnel.

(12)

A Member State may restrict the number of recognised organisations it authorises in accordance with its needs, based on objective and transparent grounds, subject to control exercised by the Commission in accordance with a committee procedure.

(13)

This Directive should ensure freedom to provide services in the Community; accordingly the Commission should be entitled to negotiate, with those third countries where some of the recognised organisations are located,▐ equal treatment for the recognised organisations domiciled in the Community.

(14)

A tight involvement of the national administrations in ship surveys and in the issue of the related certificates is necessary to ensure full compliance with the international safety rules even if the Member States rely upon recognised organisations, which are not part of their administration for carrying out statutory duties. It is appropriate, therefore, to establish a close working relationship between the administrations and the recognised organisations authorised by them, which may require that the recognised organisations have a local representation on the territory of the Member State on behalf of which they perform their duties.

(15)

Divergence in terms of financial liability regimes among the recognised organisations working on behalf of the Member States would impede the proper implementation of this Directive. In order to contribute to solving this problem it is appropriate to bring about a degree of harmonisation at Community level of the liability arising out of any marine casualty caused by a recognised organisation, as decided by a court of law, including settlement of a dispute through arbitration procedures.

(16)

The measures necessary for the implementation of this Directive should be adopted in accordance with Council Decision 1999/468/EC of 28 June 1999 laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission (6).

(17)

In particular the Commission should be empowered to amend this Directive in order to incorporate subsequent amendments to the international conventions, protocols, codes and resolutions related thereto. Since those measures are of general scope and are designed to amend non-essential elements of this Directive, inter alia by supplementing it with new non-essential elements, they must be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny provided for in Article 5a of Decision 1999/468/EC.

(18)

Member States should nevertheless be left with the possibility of suspending ▐ their authorisation of a recognised organisation for reasons of serious danger to safety or the environment. The Commission should decide without delay, in accordance with a committee procedure, whether any national measure to the above effect should be overruled .

(19)

Member States should periodically assess the performance of the recognised organisations working on their behalf and provide the Commission and all the other Member States with precise information related to such performance.

(20)

As port authorities, Member States are required to enhance safety and prevention of pollution in Community waters through priority inspection of ships carrying certificates of organisations which do not fulfil the common criteria, thereby ensuring that ships flying the flag of a third State do not receive more favourable treatment.

(21)

At present there are no uniform international standards to which all ships must conform either at the building stage or during their entire lifetime, as regards hull, machinery and electrical and control installations. Such standards may be fixed according to the rules of recognised organisations or to equivalent standards to be decided by the national administrations in accordance with the procedure laid down in Directive 98/34/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 June 1998 laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical standards and regulations and of rules on Information Society services (7).

(22)

Since the objective of this Directive, namely to establish measures to be followed by the Member States in their relationship with organisations entrusted with the inspection, survey and certification of ships, operating in the Community, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale of the action, be better achieved at Community level, the Community may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty. In accordance with the principle of proportionality, as set out in that Article, this Directive does not go beyond what is necessary in order to achieve that objective.

(23)

The obligation to transpose this Directive into national law should be confined to those provisions which represent a substantive change as compared with the Directive 94/57/EC. The obligation to transpose the provisions which are unchanged arises under that Directive.

(24)

This Directive should be without prejudice to the obligations of the Member States relating to the time limits for transposition into national law of the Directives set out in Annex I, Part B.

(25)

In accordance with point 34 of the Interinstitutional Agreement on better law-making (8), Member States are encouraged to draw up, for themselves and in the interest of the Community, their own tables, illustrating, as far as possible, the correlation between this Directive and the transposition measures, and to make them public.

(26)

Measures to be followed by recognised organisations are laid down in Regulation (EC) No …/… of the European Parliament and the Council of … (9) [on common rules and standards for ship inspection and survey organisations]  (10)║,

(a)

to ensure that Member States effectively and consistently discharge their obligations as flag States in accordance with international conventions;

(b)

to establish measures to be followed by the Member States in their relationship with recognised organisations which they have entrusted with the inspection, survey and certification of ships for compliance with the international conventions on safety at sea and prevention of marine pollution, while furthering the objective of freedom to provide services. This process includes the development and implementation of safety requirements for hull, machinery and electrical , radiotelephone, and control installations of ships falling under the scope of those international conventions.

(a)

‘ship’ means a ship falling within the scope of the international conventions;

(b)

‘ship flying the flag of a Member State’ means a ship registered in and flying the flag of a Member State in accordance with its legislation. Ships not corresponding to this definition are assimilated to ships flying the flag of a third country;

(c)

‘inspections and surveys’ means inspections and surveys that are mandatory under the international conventions and under this Directive and other Community legislation concerning maritime safety ;

(d)

‘international conventions’ means the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea of 1 November 1974, (SOLAS 74)▐ the International Convention of Load Lines of 5 April 1966 , the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships of 2 November 1973 (Marpol), the International Convention on Tonnage Measurement of Ships, 1969 (Tonnage 69), the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers, 1978 (STCW 1978), and the Convention on International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, 1972 (COLREG 72), together with the protocols and amendments thereto, and the related codes of mandatory status in all Member States, in their up-to-date version;

(e)

‘Flag State Code’ means parts 1 and 2 of the ‘Code for the Implementation of Mandatory IMO Instruments’, adopted by the IMO through Assembly Resolution A.996(25) on 29 November 2007, in its up-to-date version;

(f)

‘administration’ means the competent authorities of the Member State whose flag the ship is flying, including departments, agencies, and bodies, in charge of the implementation of the Flag State-related provisions of the IMO Conventions;

(g)

‘organisation’ means a legal entity, its subsidiaries and any other entities under its control, which jointly or separately carry out tasks falling under the scope of this Directive;

(h)

‘control’ means, for the purpose of point (g), rights, contracts or any other means, in law or in fact, which, either separately or in combination confer the possibility of exercising decisive influence on a legal entity or enable that entity to carry out tasks falling under the scope of this Directive;

(i)

‘recognised organisation’ means an organisation recognised in accordance with Regulation (EC) No …/… (11) [on common rules and standards for ship inspection and survey organisations];

(j)

‘authorisation’ means an act whereby a Member State grants an authorisation or delegates powers to a recognised organisation;

(k)

‘statutory certificate’ means a certificate issued by or on behalf of a flag State in accordance with the international conventions;

(l)

‘rules and procedures’ means a recognised organisation's requirements for the design, construction, equipment, maintenance and survey of ships;

(m)

‘ classification certificate’ means a document issued by a recognised organisation certifying the fitness of a ship for a particular use or service in accordance with the rules and regulations laid down and made public by that recognised organisation;

(n)

‘cargo ship safety radio certificate’ means the certificate introduced by the 1988 Protocol amending SOLAS, adopted by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).

(i)

to authorise organisations to undertake fully or in part inspections and surveys related to statutory certificates including those for the assessment of compliance with the rules referred to in Article 15(2) and, where appropriate, to issue or renew the related certificates; or

(ii)

to entrust recognised organisations with the task of undertaking fully or in part the inspections and surveys referred to in point (i);

(a)

particulars of the ship (name, IMO number, etc.);

(b)

dates of the surveys, including additional and supplementary surveys, if any, and audits;

(c)

identification of the recognised organisations involved in the certification and classification of the ship;

(d)

identification of the body which has inspected the ship under Port State control provisions and dates of the inspections;

(e)

outcome of the port State control inspections (deficiencies: yes or no; detentions: yes or no);

(f)

information on casualties;

(g)

identification of the ships which have ceased to fly the flag of the Member State concerned during the previous 12 months.

—

port State control detention rates,

—

flag State inspection results, and

—

performance indicators, as may be appropriate, to determine whether staffing, resources and administrative procedures are adequate to meet the flag State obligations.

(a)

the provisions set out in Appendix II of IMO Resolution A.739(18) on guidelines for the authorisation of organisations acting on behalf of the administration, while drawing inspiration from the Annex, Appendices and Attachment to IMO MSC/Circular 710 and MEPC/Circular 307 on a model agreement for the authorisation of recognised organisations acting on behalf of the administration.

(b)

the following provisions concerning financial liability:

(c)

provisions for a periodical audit by the administration or by an impartial external body appointed by the administration into the duties the organisations are undertaking on its behalf, as referred to in Article 13(1);

(d)

the possibility for random and detailed inspections of ships;

(e)

provisions for compulsory reporting of essential information about their classed fleet, and changes, suspensions and withdrawals of class.

(a)

incorporate, for the purposes of this Directive, subsequent amendments to the international conventions, protocols, codes and resolutions related thereto referred to in Articles 2(d), 3(1) and 9(2), which have entered into force;

(b)

alter the amounts specified in points (ii) and (iii) of Article 9(2)(b).

(a)

the Member State shall inform the Commission and the other Member States of its decision without delay and shall give substantiated reasons therefor ;

(b)

the Commission, having regard to safety and pollution prevention, must assess the reasons put forward by the Member State for suspending its authorisation of the recognised organisation;

(c)

acting in accordance with the regulatory procedure referred to in Article 10(2), the Commission shall inform the Member State whether or not its decision to suspend the authorisation is sufficiently justified for reasons of serious danger to safety or the environment. If the decision is not justified, the Commission shall request the Member State to withdraw the suspension. If the decision is justified and the Member State, pursuant to Article 8(1), has restricted the number of organisations acting on its behalf, the Commission shall request the Member State to grant a new authorisation to another recognised organisation to replace the suspended organisation.