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Flags of Convenience

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After picking up the Flags Of Convenience (FOC) chart I was interested in finding out more about FOCs... some detail follows.

FOC ship-owners are people who, for a variety of reasons all connected with making money, have chosen to give their ship a false nationality. Ships flying the flag of Panama, Liberia etc. have no real connection with these countries. The owner has simply chosen the flag from a wide selection on offer, and then chosen the nationality of the crew in the same way. The FOC countries do not enforce minimum social standards or trade union rights for seafarers. If they did, ship-owners would soon lose interest in them. The countries from which the crew are recruited can do little to protect them, even if they wanted to, because the rules which apply on board are those of the country of registration.

Many seafarers working on FOC ships receive shockingly low wages, live in very poor on-board conditions, and work long periods of overtime without proper rest. They get little shore leave, inadequate medical attention, and often safety procedures and vessel maintenance are neglected (in many cases reported to the ITF, FOC ships have been unseaworthy). In some of the worst cases, seafarers are virtual prisoners on FOC vessels...

Definition: In defining an FOC register, the ITF takes as the most important factor whether the nationality of the ship-owner is the same as the nationality of the flag. In 1974 the ITF defined an FOC as follows: "Where beneficial ownership and control of a vessel is found to lie elsewhere than in the country of the flag the vessel is flying, the vessel is considered as sailing under a flag of convenience."

It is the ITF Fair Practices Committee (or the FPC sub-committee) which decides what is and what isnšt an FOC. The FPC maintains a list of countries offering FOC facilities and from time to time adds or deletes countries from the list. The basis for membership of this select club is the so-called "Rochdale Criteria" laid down by a British Committee of Inquiry in 1970. These were:

the country allows non-citizens to own and control vessels;
access to and transfer from the register is easy;
taxes on shipping income are low or non-existent;
the country of registration doesnšt need the shipping tonnage for its own purposes but is keen to earn the tonnage fees;
manning by non-nationals is freely permitted;
the country lacks the power (or the willingness) to impose national or international regulations on its' ship-owners.

In today's world with second registers, bareboat charter arrangements and other methods designed to get around ITF policy, defining an FOC is becoming more and more difficult. However, ships registered in an FOC register which can demonstrate that they are genuinely owned in that country are not treated as FOCs. Equally, ships from countries not on the list will be treated as FOCs if the ITF receives information that they are beneficially owned in another country.

The list, as at 13 June 1997:

Antigua & Barbuda, Aruba (added June 1997), Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Burma, Cambodia (added June 1997), Canary Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Cyprus, Germany Second Register GIS, Gibraltar, Honduras, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Netherlands Antilles, Panama, Sri Lanka, St Vincent & the Grenadines, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

As well as adding Aruba and Cambodia to the list, the FPC felt that the Singapore, Philippines, Estonia, Ukraine, D