14 March 2002
U.S. Officials Working Toward Stronger Security at Sea
(Most U.S. proposals at IMO forum get strong backing) (1087)
By Andrzej Zwaniecki
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- The United States is pushing an ambitious agenda aimed
at boosting international maritime security, a senior U.S. Coast guard
official says.
An International Maritime Organization (IMO) working group has
endorsed a major U.S. initiative for countering terrorism at sea, U.S.
Coast Guard Assistant Commandant Rear Admiral Paul Pluta said in a
March 8 interview.
When the United States increased security at its domestic ports and
waterways immediately after the September 11 attacks, he noted, it
also realized that it couldn't effectively prevent terrorist attacks
in ports or at sea without international cooperation.
Following the IMO's call for a complete review of its security
regulations, the United States proposed measures that would
dramatically enhance security requirements for ships and ports and
make information about vessels, crews and owners more transparent,
Pluta said.
At its February meeting in London the working group recommended that
the IMO Maritime Safety Committee consider the following U.S.
proposals that were developed by the working group participants:
-- Installing security equipment on ships to prevent the boarding of
unauthorized personnel in ports and at sea.
-- Accelerating the implementation schedule for mandatory installation
of automatic identification system (AIS) on ships traveling abroad,
similar to transponders used in planes, to provide their identity,
position, course and speed.
-- Deploying an alarm system on ships to notify authorities and other
vessels of a terrorist hijacking.
-- Creating a verifiable seafarer identification document.
-- Establishing an international standard for port vulnerability
assessment.
-- Establishing international measures that would enhance the
integrity of all cargo containers.
-- Developing security plans for ships and ports.
-- Placing maritime security officers on board cargo ships and at the
headquarters of the ship-operating company (currently only passenger
ships are required to have security plans and carry a security officer
on board).
If the IMO's Maritime Safety Committee accepts these recommendations
during its May session, a special diplomatic conference in December
will consider necessary changes to the International Convention for
the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), Pluta said.
He said participants of the London meeting, which brought together
delegates from 70 of the 161 member countries (an unusually high
number), met other U.S. proposals with reservations.
Several countries, mostly those with a federal system of government
such as Germany, expressed jurisdictional concerns related to port
vulnerability assessment and port security plans, Pluta said.
He said they were skeptical about whether the IMO mandate can be
extended ashore and whether federal governments have authority to
impose requirements on state governments. Other countries complained
that such security requirements might not be appropriate for small
ports, Pluta added.
Delegates recognized that achieving full transparency of information
on ownership and control of ships would be difficult because of the
complex legal ownership regimes in several countries, he said.
"We may never get there," Pluta added.
But because of a concern expressly identified in the U.S. proposal
that ships could be used to support terrorist activities, he said, the
working group agreed that the IMO needs to pursue this initiative
vigorously.
Raising the most controversy, Pluta said, was a U.S. proposal for
seafarers' background checks as a condition of issuing seafarer
identity documents. Many delegates contended that this requirement
would violate their countries' constitutional and legal systems as
encroachments on civil liberties, he added.
"That was pretty much a non-starter," Pluta said.
The IMO working group agreed to cooperate closely with the
International Labor Organization on developing a seafarer document and
with the World Customs Organization on the container security issue,
he said.
During the IMO and other international meetings, the security of cargo
container shipping has emerged as a key concern of public officials
and businesspeople. They pointed out that containers could be used to
smuggle weapons of mass destruction or terrorists and emphasized the
difficulties of screening the containers that move in high volumes.
In 2001, about 150 million full and 40 million empty containers moved
globally, according to the IMO, and only a small percentage (2-3
percent in the United States) of these containers was inspected at
countries' borders.
An IMO February news release said that creating a secure chain of
custody for cargo containers is "a particularly complex and difficult
one [problem] to solve in the short term," considering the magnitude
of cargo container traffic and the need to move them without
significant delays.
The chain of custody for cargo containers was also high on the agenda
of another international body, a Maritime Transportation Committee
working group that met March 7-8 in Paris under auspices of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Bruce Carlton, an associate administrator of the Maritime
Administration in the U.S. Transportation Department who chaired that
meeting, said that the group follows the developments at the IMO
related to container traffic with great interest. But because the
issue also involves land transportation, he said in a March 12
interview, it "may be beyond the IMO mandate."
"I don't believe that the IMO is going to get to the land side part of
the business," he said. And "if it doesn't we will pick it up from
there," he added.
Participants of the meeting from both the public and private sector
discussed also ideas for sharing the cost of increased security,
identifying ship ownership, and exchanging information on best
practices.
The United States has already gotten ahead of other countries on
container security by trying to place its customs inspectors in
foreign seaports with the highest volumes of U.S.-bound container
traffic.
U.S. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner said in January that the
United States was seeking cooperation on security from 10 "mega-ports"
that account for nearly half of all containers coming into U.S.
seaports. Such cooperation sanctioned by governments in charge of
these ports would allow the U.S. agency to place inspectors in Hong
Kong, Shanghai and Yantian (China), Singapore, Kaohsiung (Taiwan),
Pusan (South Korea), Tokyo (Japan), Bremerhavn (Germany), Rotterdam
(the Netherlands) and Genoa (Italy).
The U.S. Customs Service announced February 22 a container security
initiative that proposed to establish security criteria for
identifying high-risk containers and screening them at the ports of
origin.
The agency recently used an antiterrorism agreement with Canada to
place U.S. customs inspectors at three Canadian seaports to help
inspect cargo containers bound for the United States.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
|
Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list
|
|
|
