Hands On with the IMO

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for regulating global shipping. Headquartered in London, its primary mandate is to ensure the safety, security, and efficiency of international shipping while preventing marine and atmospheric pollution from ships. By developing and maintaining a comprehensive regulatory framework—which includes international treaties covering vessel design, construction, equipment, and operation—the IMO facilitates global cooperation among member states to promote fair, sustainable, and secure maritime trade.

In this episode Barry talks about his recent experience at the IMO and breaks down some of the processes that are involved in the 111th Maritime Safety Committee at which Barry is an IMO delegate. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome everyone to the next episode of the Maritime Education Podcast. My name is Barry Sadler, and to those of you coming to us for the first time, an extremely warm welcome. It's great to have you on board. Those of you who are seasoned listeners, great to have you back. Today I'd like to talk a little bit about the IMO, the International Maritime Organization based in London. Four months ago, I was lucky enough to be invited to participate as a volunteer delegate for the Nautical Institute at the IMO in London. I was given several options as to which committees I would like to attend and settled on the 111th Maritime Safety Committee, which is currently running at the IMO from the 13th till the 22nd of May 2026. The 10th and 11th Maritime Safety Committee is a committee which has been running well for 111 times and focuses on the safety of shipping. Now, you may think that when we focus on the safety of shipping, we are simply talking about navigational safety, perhaps safety with dangerous goods. But the safety issues that are discussed at the Maritime Safety Committee are far and wide. They are very, very broad. Now, one of the principles about being at the IMO is that until the minutes of the Maritime Safety Committee have been published on the last day of the actual committee itself, which is of course the 22nd of May, we are unable to report on the actual outcomes and discussions that have been had at the IMO. That gives the IMO a little bit of privacy to be able to go away and debate all of the items on the very, very extensive agenda, and do so in a way that does not suffer influence or interpretation from outside the IMO until its very important decisions have been reached, codes developed, and documents updated as we move forward in the progression of maritime standards across the globe. So the purpose of my podcast today is not to inform you of any of the decisions that I have seen made within the IMO this week, but mainly to give you an insight as to how the IMO works and what it's like actually being there in some of these meetings and listening to the debates that go on. Situated on what's known as the Albert Embankment. The building itself is very, very impressive. Unless you were looking out for it, you could actually just stroll past it. But sat right at the front of the building, there is a bronze statue of the bow of a ship, and stood on it is a merchant seaman with a heaving line ready to cast his heaving line ashore. I think this is a really, really powerful image that the IMO have developed by having this bronze bow where it is. It sticks out into the street. Now, most people I see walking past the IMO don't look up at it, they don't even acknowledge its presence. Whereas if you're heading towards the IMO, or indeed you're in the IMO looking out through the windows at this bronze statue, it is a very meaningful image. Why? Well, because we are reminded so many times within the committee that the IMO is there for seafarers, and its primary objective is the safety of those who work on board ships and protection of the marine environment. The bronze statue itself is there to remind everybody of that fundamental principle, and as you enter the building, you can't help but notice it, and therefore you can't help but realign yourself to the fact that you are there for that very reason. As you enter the IMO, you are struck by the number of ship models at the IMO. Now, ship models uh feature in various places uh around the globe. Uh, we have ship models in the port of Southampton, we've got ship models in uh company headquarters of shipping companies, um, ship models at places like the Honorable Company of Master Mariners and other maritime establishments. But the number and scale of the ship models that you see as you enter, even just the lobby of the IMO are incredibly impressive. You have to go through security checks, as you would expect, for any international organization, before being admitted into the main part of the building itself, because once you've presented your credentials and been issued with your badge, that pretty much gives you access to all the areas of the IMO building itself. But importantly, it gives you access to the main hall and to the meeting rooms where the working groups have been set up. Once through the security barriers at the IMO, you are confronted by some amazing art and some amazing, shall we say, wall structures or wall statues. There's no better way to try and describe it really. They're not a piece of art, they're not a picture, and they're not a statue, they're kind of a combination between the two, and they have been donated by the various members of the IMO, and these amazing pieces of art are scattered around the building. The building itself is set out over seven floors, and the initial part of the building that you enter is just a small part of the actual organization of the IMO. Now, when you're sat on the terrace, and the terrace is amazing, um, where the delegates are uh are fed, there is a terrace which you can go out on, which overlooks the Thames. To your right, you have an amazing view of the Houses of Parliament. But if you turn around and look behind yourself when you're on this terrace, you can see that the IMO building itself is incredibly large. The IMO budget for uh each year is around 40 million uh pounds. Now that doesn't sound a lot for an international organization, but it's certainly enough to allow the organization to operate, allow the building to operate efficiently, and allow everything to happen the way it's intended to happen at the IMO with regards to the safety committees that we have, the meetings that we have, and to allow the decision train to continue along its process and the various conventions, um, the various resolutions to come out of the IMO. The main hall itself is incredibly impressive. I very naively thought that when I was going to the Maritime Safety Committee, the Maritime Safety Committee would be a much smaller meeting. I didn't imagine there to be many flag states there at all. I imagine the flag states to be, if you like, hand picked for the Maritime Safety Committee and for me to be in a room with perhaps 30 or 40 other flag states. That's absolutely not the case. There are over 120 flag states accredited with representatives at the Maritime Safety Committee, and therefore the committee itself sits in the main hall. The main hall houses not just the Maritime Safety Committee, but of course it will also house a General Assembly where all 176 members of the IMO will sit periodically. But for this week it houses the Maritime Safety Committee. As well as your 120 plus flag states at the Maritime Committee, you've also got your non-government organizations such as the Nautical Institute that I'm there with represented at these committee meetings. Now, the way it works is that there is a designated chair of the Maritime Safety Committee. The chair sits at the front of the room, along with the Secretary General and other advisors who will keep the process not just moving along, but ensure that the process follows the remit of the IMO and that the decisions that are made and indeed the way in those the way those decisions are made falls in line with the principles of the IMO. Now, what is absolutely incredible, and I've never experienced this before, are the interpreters that are there to interpret what's said into various languages. We all have headsets, and our headsets can be set to either listen to the floor in its raw audio because the room is so huge you can't hear somebody speaking at the other end of it. So you've always got to have your headphones on, regardless of whether the person that's speaking in the room is speaking English or whether they're speaking their native tongue, you still got to have the headphones on, as you won't be able to hear them. The room is so huge. So our headphones are on to be able to get the translation that we want. So you can listen to the raw floor and hear what's being said, or you can switch across to English, and as long as the person in the hall is speaking in English, you'll hear the uh the raw audio from the floor. But the moment that person starts speaking in their native tongue, this is where these incredible interpreters step in, and your headphones will start to give you the translation of what's being said. Now, the interpreters sometimes have a script given to them that's going to be said by somebody who um who's making a representation or what's known as an intervention at the uh the Maritime Safety Committee. So they do have a rough idea sometimes of what that delegate is going to say, but most of the time they have to sit there and they have to listen to what's being said and translate it on the go. And I find this absolutely incredible. You can see the translators above the main hall, they sit behind um shaded windows and uh they look down over the hall so they can see everything developing. They will, of course, hear the audio of the native speaker, be them speaking in Spanish, Italian, French, whatever. They can hear that person speaking, they will then interpret directly from what they hear, and that's what we hear on our headphones. When our headphones are, of course, set to uh set to English as mine is. These people do an incredible job. Uh I I I honestly was not ready for the expertise that these interpreters have to be able to translate on the hoof as fast as they do. They may be a second or two behind the speaker, but that's it. There's no big pregnant pauses while they try to think of what the English word for a particular phrase is. They do it as they go along, and my hat's off to them. So at the start of the Maritime Safety Committee, uh, an extensive agenda is put out with the various items that are going to be discussed at the Maritime Safety Committee, along with the various papers that have been submitted, either by countries on their own, unilaterally, or countries that uh multilaterally have put in something that has been sponsored by more than one country. And some papers, of course, have been sponsored both by flag states and, of course, by NGOs and non-government organizations such as the Nautical Institute. These papers set out the items and topics for discussion, and they are worked through one by one at the Maritime Safety Committee. The chair will introduce the item, he will go through the discussion points that have been identified within the agenda item, and he will then open up the floor to comments from those that are present. On the walls of the main hall are television screens, and those television screens will carry two pieces of information. One, they will carry video from the actual hall itself. So when somebody's speaking, the cameras will automatically swing round onto the speaker so that everybody in the hall can see who's speaking on these um very large screens within the hall. So you're not hearing a voice coming from the um the ether somewhere within the hall. You can actually see who's speaking uh and uh see them on the television in front of you. Doesn't matter who it is, whether it's a uh a flag state, whether it's a uh an NGO, uh whoever is speaking, whoever has been given the floor by the uh by the chair, they'll be on this camera so you can actually see who's speaking. The other bit of information on the screen are those um persons that have requested the floor. So it's not just a big free-fall, it's not just a big bun fight in there. Everybody has got a microphone and a button on it, and if they wish to contribute towards the discussion on a particular agenda item known as an intervention, they will push a button on their microphone. On a big screen above the uh the chair's table, there is a list of all of those flag states NGOs that have pushed their button in order to make an intervention. And they line up on the screen, 20 of them show on the screen. If there's more than 20 people that want to make an intervention, there's a little plus sign in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen to show you there's more people waiting. And what the chair will do is the chair will then give the floor to each one of those persons that have pushed their button for an intervention for them to make a statement or comment upon the agenda item that's being discussed. Now, obviously, if somebody comments about something and uh another flag state or NGO has something to say about that comment, then they'll push their button and they'll come along at the uh at the end of the list. And it's a really fair and uh amicable way of allowing people to speak. Nobody can butt in at the uh at an IMO meeting, everybody has to patiently wait their turn within the queuing system, having pushed their button to say they wish to make an intervention. It's very telling when you are on an agenda item that is perhaps a hot topic, as the moment the chair has finished going through the agenda item and what's going to be discussed at the agenda item, the screen lights up as flag states and NGO all push their intervention button and um and wait patiently to be heard by the uh chair. Some of the items that we have uh that we have discussed um on the um uh in the Maritime Safety Committee have caused the uh a screen to light up massively with uh scores of people wishing to make interventions. And uh these these people sit there patiently waiting. Now there are points of order that the uh that the chair may have to bring in. So everybody, of course, must be very, very respectful of what other states have said. Nobody can sit there and condemn another state, they will always thank other states for their contribution before either making a challenge or um uh deciding that they are going to um say something different or challenge what's being said. But it's all very very orderly. And this way, one the interpreters, two, those that are making notes on the actual committee itself, and three, those that are trying to listen and follow the debate are able to, if you like, record or not obviously record on their phones, but sort of mentally record what's being said in order to move on with the debate. This will continue until the chair has found what he or she decides is a consensus within the room. Now, if a consensus cannot be found, then a flag state may call for a vote on a particular item, but most of the items that are discussed at the IMO, particularly at the Maritime Safety Committee, result in a consensus being reached by the room. Now, this consensus is reached fundamentally by the discussions that happen within the room, and the uh debate goes on until that consensus has been reached. Now, that may mean that adjustments to the agenda, adjustments to the proposals are proposed by the chair themselves in order to ensure that this happens, but ultimately the room itself is there to debate and discuss and to form a consensus on an agenda item moving forward. Now, that's not where it stops, it doesn't just stop in the main hall. An agenda item may be sent to a working group for further work on that agenda item. And yesterday I was privileged enough to sit in on the working group discussing marine uh autonomous surface ships and the non-mandatory mass code that the IMO is developing. Working groups happen in different rooms at the IMO, much smaller rooms than the main hall, the main assembly hall that I've just described to you. Um, these rooms uh will hold uh a lot fewer people, perhaps between 50 uh 50 and 100 delegates, and they are run in a similar way to the way that the um that the main hall is run. The technology isn't there, sometimes the interpreters are not there to uh to be able to interpret everything that's said, so most of the deliberations at the working group do in fact happen in uh in English because the uh the interpreters are mainly confined to the main hall. But nonetheless, the um the principle is the same. Um, we have a chair, uh, we have a secretariat, and they will sit at the front of the working group and they will invite comments on the various aspects that the working group has been tasked with. Each working group is tasked by plenary. Pleenary is the name given to the main hall assembly. And items start at plenary in the main hall that I have just described, and if necessary, are moved out to a working group for additional work to be done on a document, on a principal, and that working group will report back to the main hall, report back to the plenary at the end of the committee session itself. Working groups are a lot more relaxed than the main hall. Each working group has a fairly tight set of requirements that are given by plenary. So the working group just doesn't go away and start to work on something that it feels like working on. It will be given a remit by plenary to go away and achieve. Now, what's made the deliberations in that working group particularly interesting is the fact that we weren't sitting there making a mandatory code. The mass code at the moment is a voluntary code, which the IMO hope that governments and flag states will start to implement in order to gain experience in how the code actually works before the code goes back into the Maritime Safety Committee, many years down the line, by the way, but back into the Maritime Safety Committee for further debate and production of the mandatory code itself. So, particularly with new technology and new principles like autonomous vessels, the IMO is not going to go straight to a mandatory code because the IMO itself and those that are at the IMO do not possess the necessary experience to be able to develop a mandatory code that's going to be effective and fair. So the experience building period associated with the uh the mass code is several years long, so that ships that are operating autonomously under the non-mandatory code can be observed and the results and the data reported back to the IMO so that they are able to craft the mandatory code in such a way that it works for everybody involved with it. And I think that's a really important principle with new codes and new technologies that are being applied, is that we don't try and bring in the code from scratch because surface autonomy is new. This is new technology, and it's something that even the most seasoned uh members of the IMO don't have enough data and experience to be able to develop a mandatory code from scratch. There are smaller committees that are set up by the plenary. There are also what we call drafting groups that are set up by the plenary as well. Uh, these are groups which meet in uh again much smaller rooms than even the working group rooms, and they are there to draft a um a statement, draft a document on behalf of plenary in order to obtain a working document. Now you might say, well, that's what the working group for mass is doing, but it's not. The working group for mass is developing the code rather than just drafting something from it. So the drafting group uh and the several of them on the go at the moment, the IMO, basically draft um documents on behalf of plenary and return them to plenary, who may shoot them out to a working group for uh for further debate after that. So the whole process of a maritime safety committee is is is quite a structured, um, no, not quite structured, very, very structured approach to development of new international standards that are um then promulgated to flag states, and flag states are then um, like any standard that comes out of the IMO, um, invited to uh to be signatories to and uh to go ahead and develop their own national legislation to enforce it on board the ships. I think what struck me as a uh an IMO first-timer was the size of the committee. I expected a much smaller maritime safety committee. I didn't expect there to be somewhere in the region of 150 people sat in the committee room. And I was really encouraged by the way in which the discussions at the working group were held. The fact that it allows people, although they've got to follow the protocol of the IMOs, they've got to put their uh their sign up, they've got to wait for the chair to invite them to speak, and the comments have got to be respectful and proactive towards the development of what's happening. Um the working groups are able to function incredibly efficiently uh around the plenary. And uh that's a uh an important thing, I think, for me to report back to those of you that are reliant upon the IMO to develop standards that um one keep you safe at sea, and two uh standards which allow you to implement these things at sea uh without um you know without struggling to interpret what's required. I've got another three days at the IMO, and uh uh over the next uh um few days I'll be watching what happens and uh I will be able to report back to you all on some of the discussions that I was party to at the IMO. Once the minutes of the Maritime Safety Committee have been published, which normally happens at around midday on the last day, so the 22nd of um uh 22nd of May, uh we should uh possess the minutes of the Maritime, the 111th Maritime Safety Committee. Once we've got those, that means that the uh the decisions have been made and they can be made public and I can sit down and talk to you uh about the individual items that were discussed. But protocol for the time being means that I can only tell you about the structure that I've observed I've observed going into the IMO. I have to say that if anybody listening to this forecast has the opportunity to get involved as a delegate at the IMO, be it as a voluntary delegate or be it as a uh uh as a delegate as part of a uh uh a formal flag state structure, then please do take the opportunity to go in there and and look. All of us at sea, uh whether we are operating as ships crews, as pilots, as as as lecturers, as anything to do with the the maritime legislation part of uh of being at sea. In other words, if any of us have to implement anything that comes out of the IMO, be it Solas, Marpole, or anything like that, it's reassuring, I think, when somebody goes there for the first time and can turn around to you all and say, look, the process that they adopt at the IMO, whilst the decisions you may not agree with, the process that they use to reach those decisions is a robust one. And the experience, the maritime experience within that main hall, the maritime experience within the working groups is incredible. And sitting and listening to the comments and the interventions by people makes you realize exactly how much experience is there and where that experience can be used to develop um standards that we will all one benefit and two find relatively straightforward to implement on board our ships. Thank you all very much for listening uh to this uh podcast. Uh, as I say, I will return and uh be able to speak in a little bit more detail about some of the agenda items that were discussed at the 111th uh Maritime Safety Committee. But in the meantime, thanks for listening, everyone. We look forward to welcoming you back to the Maritime Education Podcast again in the very near future. Um, do hit subscribe, please, and uh and subscribe. Uh we've got a uh a very, very long back catalogue of uh podcasts for you to uh to listen to. Um, all of which are uh I try to make topical as to uh what's happening within the maritime world, and hopefully you'll find them all interesting as well as finding this one of benefit. In the meantime, guys, do have a uh a great day, and we'll speak to you all again soon. Thank you.