A Study on the Improvement of Port State Control in Korea

우리나라의 항만국통제 제도의 개선에 관한 연구

To ensure ship's safety and preserve the marine environment from ship, IMO(International Maritime Organization) has been making much efforts. Nevertheless there are still many possibilities threatening ship's safety and the marine environment. Many vessels navigate at sea in lack of standard required by the International Convention relevant to ship's safety and the protection of marine environment. Even though the administration is responsible for perfect and continuous control for safety of ship, it cannot has jurisdiction over ships hoist its flag reasonably at all times. So the Port State has strengthened the Port State Control(PSC) activity as one step of eliminating sub-standard vessels. In the light of the fact that mentioned above, this study deals with PSC activity in Korea and port of Pusan. Total 582 ships, inspected in port of Pusan from 1st January 1998 to 30th September 1999, were analyzed in various aspect and extracted results as follows : \circled1 The inspection rate in Korea was much lower than the other states taking part in Tokyo MOU, \circled2 For flag state, the ships belong to flag of convenience(FOC) had much more deficiencies than non-convenience flag ships, \circled3 For ship type, 39 number of general dry cargo ship were detained at Pusan with serious deficiencies, \circled4 For deficiency item, the items such as life saving appliances, safety in general, navigation, load lines and fire-fighting appliances were occupied over 71.7% of total number of deficiencies, \circled5 In Asia-Pacific region, Korea was one of flags with detention percentages exceeding 3-year(1996~1998) rolling average detention percentage. Average detention rate of Korean vessels was 6.73% which was over 0.24% of average detention rate(6.49%) in Asia-Pacific region. These results may reflect to improve the performance of PSC inspection for foreign vessels and are useful for preparing PSC inspection for ocean-going ships registered in Korea.