Port of Santos
13 The IMO mission visited Santos on 19 October 1998 and held a meeting in the Port Administration headquarters with a Brazilian delegation consisting of high level officials from all the main agencies involved with security in the port. The Brazilian delegation was headed by the Chief of the Federal Police in the city and the President of the Port of Santos. Representatives of the Brazilian Maritime Authority and Customs also attended. The IMO delegation consisted of two members of the Secretariat, an expert from the Netherlands and another expert on piracy recruited to lecture in the seminar and workshop which followed the mission. Annexes 3 and 4 give the list of participants to the meetings.
14 Addressing the meeting, the IMO representative thanked the Govenmtent representatives present for the courteous manner the IMO group had been received and expressed the hope that, through open and frank discussions, the meeting would contribute to the concerted efforts undertaken worldwide to eliminate piracy and armed robbery against ships. He was pleased to note the presence of high ranking officials from various departments of the Government with an interest in combating piracy and armed robbery against ships.
After introducing the IMO group, he gave the history of IMO's involvement in this kind of maritime crime and concluded by providing information on recent developments and relevant activities in IMO.
He said that IMO first faced the issue of piracy in 1983, following a submission by Sweden to the 13th session of the Assembly expressing concern over attacks on merchant ships, even at considerable distances from the nearest coast. IMO's reaction was the adoption of resolution A.545 and the addition of a relevant item on the agenda of the MSC. Since then, some 1300 reports had been received by IMO and this approximately represented only one-third of such unlawful acts committed worldwide.
Because attacks on ships by pirates and armed robbers continued unabated over the years which followed, in 1993 IMO sent a working group to the three States bordering the Malacca Strait on a fact-funding mission and in an effort to prompt appropriate action at both national and regional level to improve the situation in the strait. That mission, the positive results of which were warmly welcomed by the maritime community at large, was followed by a similar mission in 1994 to countries within the South China Sea.
As a result of this effort, the MSC issued MSC/Circ.622 (making recommendations to Governments on how to tackle the issue) and MSC/Circ.623 (containing relevant guidelines to shipowners, ship operators, shipmasters and crews).
The IMO representative went on providing information on the background which led the MSC, at its sixty-seventh session, to ask the Secretary-General to enter into consultations with Governments in whose waters attacks by pirates seemed to have an endemic character and, following the successful conclusion of those consultations, to send missions of experts to the countries concerned. This was the second mission undertaken under the anti-piracy project approved by the MSC, which was made possible thanks to financial contribution by Governments and international organizations.
