Council Directive 94/57/EC of 22 November 1994 on common rules and standards for ship inspection and survey organisations and for the relevant activities of maritime administrations4 has been substantially amended several times. Since further amendments are to be made, it should be recast in the interests of clarity.

In view of the nature of the provisions of Directive 94/57/EC it seems appropriate that its provisions be recast in two different Community legal instruments, namely a Directive and a Regulation.

In its Resolution of 8 June 1993 on a common policy on safe seas, the Council set the objective of removing all substandard vessels from Community waters and gave priority to Community action designed to secure the effective and uniform implementation of international rules by drawing up common standards for classification societies.

Safety and pollution prevention at sea may be effectively enhanced by strictly applying international conventions, codes and resolutions while furthering the objective of freedom to provide services.

The control of compliance of ships with the uniform international standards for safety and prevention of pollution of the seas is the responsibility of flag and port States.

Member States are responsible for the issuing of international certificates for safety and the prevention of pollution provided for under conventions such as the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea of 1 November 1974 (SOLAS 74), the International Convention on Load Lines of 5 April 1966 and the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships of 2 November 1973 (Marpol), and for the implementation of those conventions.

In compliance with such conventions all Member States may authorise to a varying extent recognised organisations for the certification of such compliance and may delegate the issue of the relevant certificates for safety and the prevention of pollution.

Worldwide a large number of the existing organisations recognised by International Maritime Organisation (IMO) Contracting Parties do not ensure either adequate implementation of the rules or sufficient reliability when acting on behalf of national administrations as they do not have reliable and adequate structures and experience to enable them to carry out their duties in a highly professional manner.

In accordance with SOLAS 74 Chapter II-1, Part A-1, Regulation 3-1, Member States are responsible for ensuring that ships flying their flag are designed, constructed and maintained in compliance with the structural, mechanical and electrical requirements of organisations, recognised by administrations. These organisations therefore produce and implement rules for the design, construction, maintenance and inspection of ships and they are responsible for inspecting ships on behalf of the flag States and certifying that those ships meet the requirements of the international conventions for the issue of the relevant certificates. To enable them to carry out that duty in a satisfactory manner they need to have strict independence, highly specialised technical competence and rigorous quality management.

Ship inspection and survey organisations play an important role in Community legislation concerning maritime safety.

Ship inspection and survey organisations should be able to offer their services throughout the Community and compete with each other while providing equal levels of safety and of environmental protection. The necessary professional standards for their activities should therefore be uniformly established and applied across the Community.

The issue of the cargo ship safety radio certificate may be entrusted to private bodies having sufficient expertise and qualified personnel.

A Member State may restrict the number of recognised organisations it authorises in accordance with its needs, based on objective and transparent grounds, subject to control exercised by the Commission in accordance with a committee procedure.

This Directive should ensure freedom to provide services in the Community; accordingly the Community should agree with those third countries where some of the recognised organisations are located, to ensure equal treatment for the recognised organisations located in the Community.

A tight involvement of the national administrations in ship surveys and in the issue of the related certificates is necessary to ensure full compliance with the international safety rules even if the Member States rely upon recognised organisations, which are not part of their administration for carrying out statutory duties. It is appropriate, therefore, to establish a close working relationship between the administrations and the recognised organisations authorised by them, which may require that the recognised organisations have a local representation on the territory of the Member State on behalf of which they perform their duties.

When a recognised organisation, its inspectors, or its technical staff issue the relevant certificates on behalf of the administration, Member States should consider enabling them, as regards these delegated activities, to be subject to proportionate legal safeguards and judicial protection, including the exercise of appropriate rights of defence, apart from immunity, which is a prerogative that can only be invoked by Member States as an inseparable right of sovereignty and therefore that cannot be delegated.

Divergence in terms of financial liability regimes among the recognised organisations working on behalf of the Member States would impede the proper implementation of this Directive. In order to contribute to solving this problem it is appropriate to bring about a degree of harmonisation at Community level of the liability arising out of any marine casualty caused by a recognised organisation, as decided by a court of law, including settlement of a dispute through arbitration procedures.

The measures necessary for the implementation of this Directive should be adopted in accordance with Council Decision 1999/468/EC of 28 June 1999 laying down the procedures for the exercise of implementing powers conferred on the Commission5.

In particular the Commission should be empowered to amend this Directive in order to incorporate subsequent amendments to the international conventions, protocols, codes and resolutions related thereto. Since those measures are of general scope and are designed to amend non-essential elements of this Directive, inter alia by supplementing it with new non-essential elements, they must be adopted in accordance with the regulatory procedure with scrutiny provided for in Article 5a of Decision 1999/468/EC.

Member States should nevertheless be left with the possibility of suspending or withdrawing their authorisation of a recognised organisation while informing the Commission and the other Member States of their decisions and giving substantiated reasons therefor.

Member States should periodically assess the performance of the recognised organisations working on their behalf and provide the Commission and all the other Member States with precise information related to such performance.

As port authorities, Member States are required to enhance safety and prevention of pollution in Community waters through priority inspection of ships carrying certificates of organisations which do not fulfil the common criteria, thereby ensuring that ships flying the flag of a third State do not receive more favourable treatment.

At present there are no uniform international standards to which all ships must conform either at the building stage or during their entire lifetime, as regards hull, machinery and electrical and control installations. Such standards may be fixed according to the rules of recognised organisations or to equivalent standards to be decided by the national administrations in accordance with the procedure laid down in Directive 98/34/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 June 1998 laying down a procedure for the provision of information in the field of technical standards and regulations and of rules on Information Society services6.

Since the objective of this Directive, namely to establish measures to be followed by the Member States in their relationship with organisations entrusted with the inspection, survey and certification of ships, operating in the Community, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale of the action, be better achieved at Community level, the Community may adopt measures, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty. In accordance with the principle of proportionality, as set out in that Article, this Directive does not go beyond what is necessary in order to achieve that objective.

The obligation to transpose this Directive into national law should be confined to those provisions which represent a substantive change as compared with the Directive 94/57/EC. The obligation to transpose the provisions which are unchanged arises under that Directive.

This Directive should be without prejudice to the obligations of the Member States relating to the time limits for transposition into national law of the Directives set out in Annex I, Part B.

In accordance with point 34 of the Interinstitutional Agreement on better law-making7, Member States are encouraged to draw up, for themselves and in the interest of the Community, their own tables, illustrating, as far as possible, the correlation between this Directive and the transposition measures, and to make them public.

Measures to be followed by ship inspection and survey organisations are laid down in Regulation (EC) No 391/2009 of the European Parliament and the Council of 23 April 2009 on common rules and standards for ship inspection and survey organisations (recast)8,