Changes from report parliamentary committee draft to plenary report

The main objective of the Commission proposal is to incorporate international standards on illegal discharges from ships into the sea into EU law and to ensure that those responsible for such discharges are subject to dissuasive, effective and proportionate penalties. The result should be to better protect the marine environment from pollution by ships and improve maritime safety. While the Rapporteur shares the aims of the Commission proposal, he proposes a number of additions and modifications to further improve the text, including:

He wants to ensure that all interested parties have easy access to the full and updated texts of International Maritime Organization (IMO) conventions - which is not the case at the time of writing. While the overarching objective of the Directive currently under consideration is to transpose important amendments to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (known as ‘Marpol 73/78’) in Union law, an up-to-date and complete text of Marpol 73/78 and its related annexes is not available on the IMO‘s website. This makes it burdensome for the sector, citizens and administrations to gain proper access to the text of Marpol 73/78 and other similar IMO conventions, and is an obstacle to full transparency and publicity in the IMO’s work.

The Rapporteur also wants to ensure that all parties, including the maritime transport sector, national administrations and civil society, have easy access to the text of reference for this Directive at the date of an infringement. When applying the provisions of this Directive and the corresponding national laws, Marpol 73/78 and its Annexes as referred to in this Directive in force at the date of infringement must be considered.

Your Rapporteur also wishes to clarify the level of penalties. It should be spelled out more clearly than in the Commission proposal that the level of administrative penalties should not be allowed to be fixed at such low levels that, de facto, the dissuasive, effective and proportionate character of these penalties is undermined. Maximum limits for administrative penalties as low as EUR 10 000 for legal persons, such as shipping companies, or minimum limits starting at only EUR 10 for natural persons and EUR 32 for legal persons, as indicated for some Member States in the accompanying impact assessment, appear to be far too low for penalising manifestly illicit behaviour or even dissuading it.

Finally, the Rapporteur wishes to clarify and increase the level of verification. He proposes that Member States thoroughly analyse all the alerts that they receive from CleanSeaNet. They should then perform a higher percentage of on-the spot verification than foreseen in the Commission proposal. To avoid clearly unnecessary on-the spot-verifications, manifest false alarms, if revealed during the analysis of the imagery, can be subtracted from this objective.

With these and further amendments, the Rapporteur wants to further improve the effectiveness of the Ship Source Pollution Directive and turn it into a more powerful tool, to the benefit of everyone, reducing sea pollution and increase maritime safety, while maintaining the proportionality of all measures.