Maritime Regulation Watch
Most write-ups of a new maritime rule stop at what the paperwork says. This page carries it through to the part that actually costs money: which ships are caught, what physically has to be fitted or written, and by when. Each entry is also tagged with where the requirement comes from — convention, IMO recommendation or industry inspection regime — because that decides which route it reaches you by, and how much warning you get.
It does not decide whether you can be pulled up on it. A recommendation still earns an observation: once it is in the safety management system it is auditable under ISM, and vetting inspectors and recognised organisations raise findings against industry guidance every day. Treat everything on this page as something you will have to answer for — the tag tells you who will ask.
How this page is sourced
Every entry is written here in our own words and carries a link to the instrument it comes from. Nothing is reproduced from copyright-protected publications: IMO sells its consolidated editions and those are not republished here. Where an exact legal wording matters, the text is taken from the freely reusable implementation — European law published on EUR-Lex, which permits commercial reuse with attribution under Decision 2011/833/EU, or United States material in the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations, which is in the public domain.
Resolutions adopted at IMO committee sessions are published openly by IMO itself and expressly invite governments to bring them to the attention of shipowners, operators and seafarers; those are linked directly. Flag State circulars are linked to the issuing administration. Class society regulatory summaries are used to find the underlying instruments, never copied.
Dates and applicability are the parts that go wrong most often in second-hand write-ups, so each entry is checked against the instrument itself before it is listed here. Anything that could not be confirmed is marked as unverified rather than quietly rounded off.
What this page deliberately does not do
It is not compliance advice and it is not a substitute for your Safety Management System, your flag administration or your classification society — it is a working tracker kept by a serving Marine and Vetting Superintendent. Where cost is discussed it is qualitative: it says which budget the requirement lands in and what drives it. No per-ship price is quoted unless a credible published figure exists, because catalogue prices for industrial equipment are not comparable to type-approved marine installations. Where a requirement creates demand for equipment, the supplier side is described as a category of business, never as a recommendation to buy or sell any security.