EC Plans To Make Ship Owners Criminally Liable For Pollution

by Robin Pilgrim, LawAndTax-News.com, London

11 March 2003

The European Commission is planning to beef up existing maritime law in order to make ship owners criminally liable for pollution which occurs as a result of deliberate rule-bending or negligence.

According to a report from Butterworths, the legal news publishers, in the preface to a recent Directive proposal which would introduce criminal liability for captains, ship owners, and classification societies, the EC revealed that:

'Deliberate or negligent 'operational' discharges - rather than high profile disasters such as the recent Prestige incident - remain the chief source of marine oil pollution...The Commission argues that the current international regime covering ship-sourced oil pollution - the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution (CLC) and the International Convention setting up the Oil Pollution Compensation Fund - concentrates too much on compensating victims to the detriment of imposing liability, which the Conventions can substantially limit.'

Butterworths revealed that the new draft Directive is aimed at correcting a number of problems with existing legislation in this area, namely inadequate port discharge facilities, poor detection rates, lack of evidence to bring to trial, patchy enforcement records throughout the EU, and excessively light penalties.

Speaking to Butterworths this week, Philip Wareham, partner with maritime law firm, Holman Fenwick & Willan explained that: 'the potential extension of liability to classification societies, shippers and 'any other persons participating in or instigating the discharge' is where the main impact in the UK is likely to be.'

However, he went on to add that: 'Shippers can only be made liable under English criminal law if they aided or abetted someone who committed the primary offence. Presumably this might occur if a shipper could be seen as being involved with the owner in, say, shipping in an obviously substandard vessel which gave rise to a pollution incident.'

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