Refusing ports of refugee is NIMBYism at sea

IN BRITISH slang, the acronym NIMBY stands for ‘not in my back yard’. Millennials often hurl the insult at pensioner councillors who routinely withhold permission to build affordable housing.

Need somewhere to live? Sorry, but we’ve already bought our houses and don’t want to look at your overpriced shoeboxes from our leafy gardens.

This mindset is not confined to local council sub-committees resolutely determined to nix planning applications. Recent years have often seen littoral states adopt a comparable stance. Let’s call it ‘not in my territorial waters’.

For the NIMTW squad, what happens at all points 12 nautical miles and beyond their shores is out of sight and out of mind. Just the latest example is this week’s Sri Lankan Supreme Court’s ruling on the X-Press Pearl casualty.

The boxship caught fire in May 2021 shortly after a leak of nitric acid from one of its containers was detected. It sank just under two weeks later, spilling billions of plastic nurdles across the Sri Lankan coastline. More than 450 turtles, whales and dolphins died as a result.

But all of this was only after requests to discharge the containers in the local ports of Hamad and Hazira had been flatly denied.

The court ruling suggests that a request to discharge in Singapore was also given short shrift, while emergency berthing permission at Colombo was eventually withdrawn.

That said, the court also found that the vessel’s master and operator were less than wholly truthful with the Sri Lankan maritime authorities about the scale of the problem.

But it was a similar story with another container vessel, Wan Hai 503 (IMO: 9294862), which was towed out of India’s waters last month after a fire broke out on board.

Not that this issue is confined to Asia. Readers who have been around for a few decades will also remember the Prestige or Erika spills, both of which took place in Europe and saw tankers denied ports of refuge.

A more recent instance still is the mid-Atlantic MSC Flaminia fire in 2012. Germany did finally allow the ship into Wilhelmshaven, but only after at least six other countries had said ‘aucune chance’ or ‘het spijt me nee’.

Our basic point here is the same one eloquently made by the UK’s Secretary of State’s representative for maritime salvage and intervention, Stephen Henning: nothing left at sea gets better without intervention.

International Maritime Organization guidelines expressly provide that littoral states should “weigh all the factors and risks in a balanced manner and give shelter” to stricken vessels “wherever reasonably possible”.

Fine words, but we’re back to the same old problem of enforcement. EU states are mandated to offer refuge and can only refuse if the vessel poses an imminent threat to the coastline.

IMO guidelines are just that: guidelines, without the weight of formal rules. The most they can do is to implore, beg, beseech, importune, entreat, exhort, encourage or advise. They cannot instruct.

As things stand, there is little prospect of governments stepping up and doing the right thing when all the political considerations stack up the other way.

Voters — already fed up with having to surf their way through raw sewage and industrial chemical discharges while on their holidays — will not want local beaches blackened with crude oil.

That will be even more the case where the vessel in danger is owned in one country, managed from another, flagged in a third, insured in a fourth and headed from a sixth to a refinery in a seventh, crewed by people carrying half a dozen miscellaneous passports.

But the humanitarian imperative remains. A burning boxship does not go away, even if you shut your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing tra la la la.

Indeed, in some circumstances, ignoring the issue actually ramps up the chances of a break-up and nasty things getting deposited on the shores of the very states that turned a vessel in need away.

Yet that message will be hard sell to the electorate, especially as disaster scenarios are peddled by mainstream media.

But as Henning rightly emphasises, once a ship is in distress, there are no good options left. The job of Britain’s Sosrep and his or her opposite numbers boils down to choosing the least-worst option instead.

For instance, that might mean deliberately beaching a containership, as with MSC Napoli in 2007. This was popular with those residents of Devon, who were thereby able to make off with entirely intact upmarket motorbikes, but not with most others.

The consequences of shrugging one’s shoulders and passing the buck — the time-honoured default mode of bureaucrats everywhere — has been proven time and time again.

But until hard and fast restrictions dictate otherwise, coastal state NIMTW-ism will remain with us. At the very least, the IMO might like to consider upgrading its guidelines to business classes.

Until it does so, no country is going to risk having its indigenous turtles suffer when somebody else’s turtles could be suffering instead.