On April 22, 2011, the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) submitted a legal analysis of shipbreaking to the Secretariat of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal. This submission, along with other submissions made by the Parties to the Basel Convention, will be discussed at the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Basel Convention in October 2011. The COP will consider whether the recently adopted Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (2009) establishes a level of control and enforcement over shipbreaking that is equivalent to the Basel Convention. CIEL’s Report, entitled “Shipbreaking and the Basel Convention: Analysis of the Level of Control established under the Hong Kong Convention,” will inform Parties with their decision on the appropriate international legal framework for the regulation of shipbreaking worldwide.
Shipbreaking is the process by which ships are dismantled so that their parts can be recycled back onto the market. Since 2004, more than 80% of vessels greater than 500 gross tons have been dismantled in South Asia (primarily Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) using a technique known as “beaching,” where ships are run up onto sandy beaches and dismantled, largely by hand. With minimal or nonexistent protections for human health or the environment, shipbreaking has resulted in substantial releases of toxic chemicals into the environment and significant damage to human health. The contamination of the environment coupled with poor working conditions are violating the human rights of the workers involved in shipbreaking, presenting issues of global concern that deserve an international response. More information on shipbreaking is available with The NGO Platform on Shipbreaking.
CIEL’s Report analyzes whether the Hong Kong Convention provides an equivalent level of control over shipbreaking as the Basel Convention. The hazardous waste generated by shipbreaking activities and the end-of-life ships themselves are currently regulated under the Basel Convention. The Report finds that the Hong Kong Convention in fact fails to provide an equivalent level of control. This is because the Hong Kong Convention is far narrower in scope in its coverage of waste, fails to adopt the prior informed consent mechanism that is essential to Basel, fails to prohibit the practice of beaching, and fails to address the need for the minimization of the transboundary movement of waste by greater national self-sufficiency in waste management. Moreover, the Hong Kong Convention does not sufficiently address the lack of capacity of developing countries to properly recycle the ships, fails to explicitly authorize countries to ban the importation of waste, and fails to require the exporting state to re-import ships that are in violation of the Convention.
Therefore, the Report recommends that end-of-life ships shall remain subject to the regulatory framework of the Basel Convention. The Basel COP should continue to engage the shipbreaking issue in order to achieve the Basel Convention’s overall goal to protect human health and the environment against the adverse effects that may result from the generation, transboundary movement and management of ships as hazardous wastes.
For more information, please contact Marcos Orellana or David Azoulay.