Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement of the Ballast Water Management Convention: The Port State Control Perspective

One of the very critical aspects for an effective implementation of the Ballast Water Management (BWM) Convention is the compliance monitoring and enforcement (CME) process. The BWM Convention provides basic requirements regarding inspections and consequences, while this process is further supported by IMO Port State Control (PSC) Guidelines and IMO G2 Guidelines on ballast water sampling (BWS). As the G2 Guidelines were recognized to lack details, further Guidance for BWS was prepared. Regional approaches under memoranda for PSC also started to develop. The latest research shows that there are still uncertainties, issues and unconformities that could penalize international shipping and on the other side it may weaken the BWM Convention implementation. CME under the BWM Convention was also recognized to be rather specific, introducing different principles and approaches than other IMO Conventions, which makes it even more challenging for PSC officers. In this chapter, we introduce the main aspects and specifics of CME of the BWM Convention, discuss related implementation issues and recommend the way forward.