What is the Voluntary IMO Member State Audit Scheme?
IMO has now adopted the Voluntary IMO Member State Audit Scheme. The Audit Scheme is designed to help promote maritime safety and environmental protection by assessing how effectively Member States implement and enforce relevant IMO Convention standards, and by providing them with feedback and advice on their current performance. Why is IMO so slow? The main purpose of IMO is to adopt international treaties which are intended to apply to as many ships as possible. Unanimity of this kind inevitably takes time – it depends on the speed with which Governments act, as well as IMO – and it can only be achieved at all by ensuring that the regulations adopted are very widely acceptable and this can take time. But when speed is necessary IMO can act very rapidly indeed. An example is the adoption in December 2002 of security measures – largely in response to the 11 September 2001 atacks in the United States. In December 2003, IMO revised the rules on oil tanker single-hull phase-out, in respon
