Over 70% of our planet’s surface is water but who is in charge of traffic on this vast highway and how has maritime law evolved?

This year sees the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, one of the most dramatic maritime tragedies the world has seen in peacetime. The disaster outraged the public at the time and has captured our imagination ever since. It has also had an enduring legacy: sweeping changes were introduced to shipping regulations as a result of that night in the North Atlantic. Subsequent incidents, including the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise and, most recently, Concordia have effected more change. In 1914 the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) was established and, with amendments over the years, these regulations still govern maritime safety today.

Working on an international scale
The primary agency for overseeing the SOLAS regulations is the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which has its headquarters in London. The IMO consists of representatives of 170 international states and has the task of regulating maritime safety and pollution from shipping, and tackling piracy and terrorism. Once its treaties are adopted it is up to the governments of the countries that sign up to make the rules part of their own national law. So in the UK and RoI, you will find the text of SOLAS as part of the Merchant Shipping Acts.

For UK territorial waters, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) works on behalf of the UK Government to enforce the regulations and in the RoI it is the Marine Survey Office (MSO) that works on behalf of the Irish Government.

Commercial or leisure?
All craft must abide by the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, known as the COLREGs, and laws relating to Marine Pollution (MARPOL) as well as the latest SOLAS regulations, SOLAS V. These cover important areas like voyage planning, carrying radar reflectors, the correct use of lifesaving signals, danger and distress messages. After that, there are specific areas of law that apply to different craft in different situations.

Commercial craft are classified depending on the size of vessel, the number of passengers carried and the area of commercial operation, from supertanker to charter cruiser – even to lifeboat. They must be inspected by the MCA or MSO against the relevant code to ensure that they are fit for purpose and have the proper safety equipment onboard. In practice, this means that if you pay for a skipper to take you out on a fishing trip, for example, you should check that he has the appropriate Code of Practice Certificate to do so.

To take out a pleasure vessel in the UK or RoI you do not need an inspection or licence but in most other European countries an International Certificate of Competence (ICC) is required. For foreign cruising,rules such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) become relevant with regard to territorial waters and freedom of navigation. For cruising pleasurecraft less than 13.7m in length there are no statutory requirements to carry safety equipment but it would be foolhardy not to do so.

Racing rules
If a boat is racing then it will have to carry the safety equipment specified for the class and event concerned by organisations such as the International Sailing Federation (ISAF). It was, sadly, another disaster that triggered improved legislation and equipment in offshore racing. In 1979 the Fastnet Race was hit by a freak storm and the mountainous seas that resulted triggered a massive rescue operation involving the RNLI, Her Majesty's Coastguard and military. The storm decimated the fleet – of the 303 starters only 86 boats finished and 24 were abandoned. There were 15 fatalities. The official inquiry led to a detailed report into the safety of small craft and covered everything from the stability and seaworthiness of yachts, to how batteries are stored, to the design of deck harnesses.

Nurturing best practice
Maritime law means nothing if rules are ignored or bypassed, or the resources aren't available to obey them. Some nations apply laws with less rigour than others, and 'flags of convenience' aid and abet merchant shipping owners in maintaining poor practice. Most of all, though, it is in the developing world that lack of regulation and/or its enforcement leads to frequent, heavy loss of life. As founder member of the International Lifeboat Federation, now the International Maritime Rescue Federation (IMRF), the RNLI has led best practice internationally for more than a century. Our latest work is with countries that are struggling to set up or run any kind of search and rescue capability.

'We work at grass-roots level in some countries where there is very little legislation,' explains International Development Manager Steve Wills. 'Ferries capsizing or sinking because they are massively overcrowded are a common occurrence. Not only are there issues like a lack of safety equipment onboard but there is a lack of coordinating the few assets that do exist to assist in the aftermath of a disaster.' And the value assigned by the world's media to the lives lost through such routine accident, migration and war is low. For example, in 2011 more than 1,500 people died attempting to flee Libya by sea, as many as lost from Titantic, but this went largely unreported. Steve stresses that the aim is not for the RNLI to start running services in other countries but to assist in planning how local people can put sustainable systems in place. (See more on page 5.)

Influencing the future
In 1994 the ferry Estonia sank in the Baltic with the loss of 852 lives. This was a modern ship in one of the world’s busiest shipping areas and again provided many valuable lessons, including developing the concept of mass rescue.

Michael Vlasto is Operations Director at the RNLI and is also Chairman of the IMRF. This body is being particularly creative and looking beyond mere evacuation methods. It's looking at making cruise ships more capable of rescuing others. 'Quite often the nearest vessel to one in distress is another large vessel that is not necessarily a rescue vessel but could still possibly aid in getting people out of the water.

The IMRF is exploring ways that this can be done,' explains Michael. Part of the thinking is that when it is too rough for a ship to launch its lifeboats to people in the water, some relatively simple adaptations might enable them to retrieve another vessel’s liferafts.

'Cruise liners are going to more and more remote places like the Antarctic and Arctic but some of them are not designed to navigate icy waters,' adds Michael. 'A suggestion of the IMRF is that they cruise in pairs so that if one gets into difficulty, help is close at hand.'

One exception
There is one area of martitime law that the RNLI chooses not to exploit – salvage. In theory, as soon as an RNLI coxswain gives a tow to another vessel he could make a salvage claim. But, as Michael Vlasto concludes: 'People would stop asking for help if they thought that the RNLI was going to claim salvage. We do not want to bring money into the RNLI at the risk of losing lives. We are first and foremost a lifesaving charity.'