• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.1169-1178
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• 2022

This study examines an effective operational plan of a maritime safety enforcement task that is distributed in the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries and the Korea Coast Guard for maritime safety. Considering the sinking of the MV Sewol and Seohae vessels and the MV Hebei Spirit oil spill, normally marine safety accidents tend to not only damage human life, property, and marine environment but can also expand to disasters; therefore, precautionary measures are required. However, the Korean government takes superficial efforts in case of large-scale accidents. In case of the MV Sewol ferry, the government only focused on punishing the officials involved as a follow up and never mentioned any effective plan, such as "unification of maritime safety enforcement," in contrast to an advanced country. As a result, there are endless major and minor backward accidents. The probability of large-scale maritime accidents and backwardness accidents is increasing owing to vessels becoming large sized, high speed, and aged; sailors being unqualified; port traffic increase, development of marine leisure; and inefficiency dual marine safety systems. Therefore, based on the review of previous studies related to maritime safety, major advanced country's cases, and unified case of the vessel traffic service, this study suggests effective methods such as coastal vessel safety management, port state control and aid to navigation management, which are directly connected with maritime safety.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Marine Environment & Safety
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.421-428
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• 2021

Identifying which international maritime legal instruments are mandatory or recommendatory is complicated task even for maritime regulatory bodies. Although International Maritime Organization (IMO) had tried to ease the complexity by adopting guidelines on uniform wordings for making reference to other instruments in IMO parent conventions, there has still been some confusion identifying the mandatory status of IMO instruments. The aim of this study was to map out a step-based guideline to resolve the complexity of the mandatory status of IMO instruments to the maximum extent possible. This study reviewed the history of IMO rule-making process to find the root cause of the problem, then analyzed the approaches of regulatory enforcement bodies to check the practices. In conclusion, readers are directed to find such information as to legal status of IMO instruments and an improvement is proposed to enhance the transparency of information sharing for maritime industry to make better informed decisions.