From EU-IMO Confrontation to Constructive Institutional Interaction

This chapter studies the years 2005 to 2015. In the early days of this period, Prestige challenged the international maritime regulatory regime—including UNCLOS—in even more fundamental ways than Braer and Erika. The fierce reactions propelled the EU onto the international maritime policy scene more forcefully than ever. Then, in November 2005, the Commission tabled its third post-Erika package of legislative proposals. This so-called Erika III package consisted of seven proposals. When these were adopted by EU Member States in 2009, the EU’s ‘maritime safety strategy’ adopted 16 years earlier, in 1993, had largely been executed. The most consequential Erika III proposals are being analysed in detail. These are the ones where both the process and outcome had the most significant impact on the balance between private and public governance in the international regime. The first of these brought yet another major revision of the legislation directed at ROs. The other two addressed EU Member States in their capacity as flag states. The chapter will explore how these developments interact with parallel advances at the international level, leading towards some form of binding IMO instruments on flag-state implementation and minimum standards for the ROs. These processes culminated in the adoption of the IMO’s Triple III and RO codes in 2013. With these codes’ entry into force in 2015, EU maritime safety regulation and the international regime largely converged. Finally, the EU competition case raised against the classification societies’ technical coordination body IACS in 2008 will be briefly outlined and assessed focusing on the impact this ‘dawn raid’ had in terms of the relationship between private and public governance in the international maritime safety regime.