*EPF418 03/14/2002
U.S. Officials Working Toward Stronger Security at Sea
(Most U.S. proposals at IMO forum get strong backing) (1060)

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.

(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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