New EU Project Aims to Improve Efficiency of Maritime Regulations

A new three year European Research Project, partly funded by the EU has been launched to help increase efficiencies in regulation compliance and enforcement for the maritime sector. e-Compliance will facilitate tighter integration and co-operation in the fragmented field of regulatory compliance. It will closely align with the EU e-Maritime initiative of which a key priority is supporting authorities and shipping operators to collaborate electronically in regulatory information management.

The maritime sector is, by necessity, heavily regulated. International, EU and national authorities create large numbers of rules and regulations; the long lifetime of ships and the different phases of their operation add to the complexity. As a result, practitioners who need to enforce or comply with regulations are often unsure as to which rules apply for a given vessel in a given situation.

Building on the success of other EU projects such as FLAGSHIP, e-Compliance will look at creating a model for managing maritime regulations digitally and thus help to harmonise these regulations. The project's consortium comprises representatives of the three main stakeholder groups involved: classification societies (who create class rules), port state control (who enforce regulations) and ships (who need to comply with regulations). This seamless co-operation between the different stakeholder groups will improve the effectiveness of regulations and reduce the burden on practitioners who work with maritime regulations on a daily basis.