"Presentation given by Dr Heike Hoppe, Senior Technical Officer at IMO, at the 2007 Annual Meeting of RINA
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Quite a few of you will know that IMO recently started work on Goal-based New Ship Construction Standards and I'm going to give you an overview today on how far we have come, what are the results, and what is there left to be done, which is quite a lot.
Surprisingly enough, IMO does not have any regulations that concern hull construction. The SOLAS convention contains hundreds of very prescriptive regulations for everything, from the number of fire exits that have to be on board to the number of life jackets, but the only regulation that concerns hull construction is in SOLAS chapter II-1 and it just states that ships should be constructed according to the requirements of the classification society which is recognised by the administration.
Now, many of our member states felt that this was not enough and they didn't have enough influence on the standards that were eventually used to construct ships. So at the 89th session of the IMO Council in 2002 there was a proposal by two members, the Bahamas and Greece to start work on ship construction standards and the proposal was further discussed at the next Maritime Safety Committee, then at the next Council and further at the following Assembly and the membership agreed that this was an issue that IMO should take on and work on and it was included in the strategic plan of the IMO and it was also included in the work programme of the Maritime Safety Committee."
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