ICS participated at the recent meeting of the United Nations Open Ended Inter Consultative Process (ICP) on Oceans and the Law of the Sea, held at the UN headquarters in New York between 17-19 June. It will be recalled that the UN ‘ICP’ provides an opportunity for governments to consider issues in advance of the annual discussion on UNCLOS at the UN General Assembly. However, the ICP is also open to participation by NGOs. Thus, apart from the need for the shipping industry to be represented for reasons of profile (IMO was also in attendance), there has also been a need in recent years to be ready to counter any negative interventions by environmentalist and trade union organisations (which, for example, have previously used the ICP to attack the open registry system). Large numbers of (largely US based) environmental NGOs were present this year, including Greenpeace.
In the event, this year’s meeting was uncontroversial from the shipping industry’s perspective. However, it provided an opportunity for ICS to make a general statement on behalf of the industry on various issues including flag state performance, piracy, the need for IMO to lead the discussions on reducing ships’ CO2 emissions (under the umbrella of UNFCCC), and the need for governments to attend the UNCITRAL signing ceremony in Rotterdam this September. (The government participants to the ICP are mostly foreign affairs officials from embassies to the UN with little direct involvement in the operational regulation of shipping.)
The main purpose of this year’s meeting (its 10th session) was to review the ability of the ICP to meet the original mandate given to it by the General Assembly in 1999 after UNCLOS came into force in 1994. Interestingly, the majority of governments that spoke (particularly the G77 bloc of developing countries) expressed concern about the way in which the ICP has sometimes been turned into a negotiation in advance of the General Assembly debate, rather than as forum for general education and the informal exchange of views. (The unhelpful decision of the ICP, a few years ago, to request the General Assembly to ask IMO and other UN agencies to explore the meaning of the so called ‘genuine link’ between ships and flag states was an example of such ‘out of hours’ negotiations, although the governments’ concern was actually with regard to mainly non-shipping issues, such as legal rights to exploit the seabed). It was also agreed that in future the agenda of the ICP should be more structured, so that interventions permitted in the plenary session will be more relevant to the topics selected for discussion. This will hopefully reduce the ability of NGOs to use the ICP to launch attacks on the shipping industry on issues not directly connected with the published agenda (as ITF and its environmentalist allies have previously been able to do).
The ICP has a mandate for a further three years, although the consensus amongst governments was that it provides a useful preparation for General Assembly debates and general information exchange, and should therefore probably be continued.