The Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control

The Paris MoU is the agreement under which 27 maritime authorities — covering most of coastal Europe plus Canada, with the Russian Federation currently suspended — commit to a shared system of port state control. Signed in Paris in January 1982 and superseding an earlier 1978 agreement signed in The Hague, it took effect on 1 July 1982 and has been amended many times since, most recently through a 46th amendment adopted in May 2025 and effective from 1 July 2025.

At its core, each signatory authority agrees to maintain an effective inspection regime, to inspect every “Priority I” foreign ship calling at its ports, and to meet an annual inspection commitment calculated for the region as a whole.

The Memorandum itself is organised around nine substantive sections: the commitments of each Authority, the list of “relevant instruments” (SOLAS, MARPOL, MLC 2006, and similar conventions) that inspections are measured against, the rules governing reporting, ship risk profiling, inspection and detention, a banning regime for ships with repeated detentions, provisions on publishing inspection data, cooperation on investigating operational pollution violations, and the administrative machinery — a Committee of maritime Authority representatives and a Secretariat based in The Hague — that runs the system and adopts amendments. Twelve detailed annexes flesh out the practical mechanics, from how ship risk profiles and company performance are calculated to the documents Port State Control Officers must check and the reporting messages ships must send before arrival.

Authorities adhere voluntarily but must meet qualitative criteria before joining, including ratifying the relevant conventions and fielding sufficiently trained inspectors.