EU NAVFOR Operational Commander Major General Charlie Stickland met with Mr. Kitack Lim, Secretary-General of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Friday 11th May 2018 at the IMO Headquarters in London. General Stickland took the opportunity to update Secretary-General Lim on EU NAVFOR’s counter-piracy Operation Atalanta. The discussion was broad ranging in nature, covering the military assessment of the Somali piracy threat, Somalia capacity building progress as well as the range of maritime security threats facing the international shipping community in the Southern Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and Western Indian Ocean area. The civil-military partnership has been a cornerstone of the success in containing the piracy threat in the region and both leaders stressed the importance of sustaining this partnership for the benefit of the region, the maritime community, including shipping delivering humanitarian aid, as well as for global trade.
As a specialised agency of the United Nations, IMO is the global standard-setting authority for the safety, security and environmental performance of international shipping. Its main role is to create a regulatory framework for the shipping industry that is fair and effective, universally adopted and universally implemented. It has always been recognized that the best way of improving safety at sea is by developing international regulations that are followed by all shipping nations and from the mid-19th century onward a number of such treaties were adopted. Several countries proposed that a permanent international body should be established to promote maritime safety more effectively, but it was not until the establishment of the United Nations itself that these hopes were realised. In 1948 an international conference in Geneva adopted a convention formally establishing IMO (the original name was the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation, or IMCO, but the name was changed in 1982 to IMO). The IMO Convention entered into force in 1958 and the new Organisation met for the first time the following year.
As a specialised agency of the United Nations, IMO is the global standard-setting authority for the safety, security and environmental performance of international shipping. Its main role is to create a regulatory framework for the shipping industry that is fair and effective, universally adopted and universally implemented. It has always been recognized that the best way of improving safety at sea is by developing international regulations that are followed by all shipping nations and from the mid-19th century onward a number of such treaties were adopted. Several countries proposed that a permanent international body should be established to promote maritime safety more effectively, but it was not until the establishment of the United Nations itself that these hopes were realised. In 1948 an international conference in Geneva adopted a convention formally establishing IMO (the original name was the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation, or IMCO, but the name was changed in 1982 to IMO). The IMO Convention entered into force in 1958 and the new Organisation met for the first time the following year.