The Cargo Record Book is the evidentiary spine of the chemical-tanker pollution-prevention regime. Where the Procedures and Arrangements Manual tells the crew how a prewash or a discharge must be done on this specific ship, the Cargo Record Book records that it was actually done, tank by tank, with the time, the place, the substance, the pollution category, and the route of every residue and every washing. Regulation 15 of the revised Annex II, adopted by IMO Resolution MEPC.118(52) on 15 October 2004 and in force from 1 January 2007, makes the book mandatory for every ship certified to carry noxious liquid substances in bulk. It is the chemical-cargo analogue of the Oil Record Book that an oil tanker keeps under Annex I Regulation 17, and it sits at the center of nearly every Annex II detention because a record that doesn’t reconcile with the cargo documents is the cleanest evidence a port State control officer can find of an unlawful discharge.
Regulation 15 in the consolidated Annex II
The number matters, and it has changed. The Annex II that entered force in 1987 carried the record-keeping duty under a different regulation number, and several legacy texts and shipboard guides still cite the old scheme. The substantial revision adopted by MEPC.118(52) renumbered every regulation when it replaced the old A-B-C-D category structure with the present X-Y-Z-OS taxonomy. In the consolidated Annex II that has applied since 1 January 2007, the Cargo Record Book is Regulation 15. Any reference to Regulation 9 for the Cargo Record Book is the pre-2007 numbering and is wrong for the current text. The sibling regulations in the same operational block are Regulation 11 (survey and certification, with the IBC Code made mandatory), Regulation 12 (pumping, piping, unloading arrangements and slop tanks), Regulation 13 (control of discharges of residues of NLS), Regulation 14 (Procedures and Arrangements Manual), and Regulation 16 (measures of control by port States). The cargo-tank-washing regulation and the cargo-tank-arrangement regulation bracket Regulation 15, and the three read together: Regulation 13 sets the prewash and discharge discipline, Regulation 16 sets the PSC powers, and Regulation 15 is the record that proves the first and feeds the second.
The renumbering is worth pinning down because it explains why shipboard guides disagree. The original Annex II entered force on 6 April 1987 with the A-B-C-D category structure & a Cargo Record Book duty carried under the pre-revision numbering. The 2004 revision, the largest the Annex has had, did three things at once: it switched the categories to X-Y-Z-OS, it tied the categorization to an updated GESAMP hazard profile, and it renumbered the regulations so the operational block fell into the 11-to-16 range it occupies now. A guide printed before 2007, or copied from one, may still place the Cargo Record Book at the old number. The current and only correct citation for a ship trading today is Regulation 15 of the consolidated Annex II.
Regulation 15 has five operative limbs. The book must be provided in the Appendix 2 form. Every operation in Appendix 2 must be promptly recorded. An emergency or accidental discharge must be entered without delay with its circumstances and reason. The officer in charge signs each operation and the master signs each page. The book is kept readily available, kept on board, and retained for three years after the last entry. Each limb generates its own PSC checklist item, and a failure on any one is a finding in its own right.
Application: which ships keep the book
The duty attaches to certification, not to the cargo on board at the moment of inspection. Every ship to which Annex II applies, which means every ship certified to carry NLS in bulk, must be provided with a Cargo Record Book. A chemical tanker holding an International Pollution Prevention Certificate for the Carriage of Noxious Liquid Substances in Bulk, the NLS Certificate of Appendix 3, or a Certificate of Fitness issued under the IBC Code, carries the book whether its tanks are full, slack, or gas-freed for survey. A product tanker that has loaded a Category Y NLS once in its trading pattern keeps the book for that trade. The certificate is the trigger, and a PSC officer who finds the certificate but no book has a finding before the cargo question is even reached.
The book may be kept as a part of the ship’s official logbook or as a separate book, and since the 2020 electronic-record-book amendments it may be kept as an approved electronic record book under MEPC.312(74). Most chemical tankers keep it as a standalone book because the entry density and the surveyor-endorsement requirement make a dedicated volume easier to present at a PSC inspection. The form is identical across flags because Appendix 2 prescribes it; what varies is the printer and the cover, not the codes or the item numbers.
The recording unit is the operation and the tank. Regulation 15.2 requires that the listed operations be recorded on a tank-to-tank basis. A loading that fills four cargo tanks generates four sets of particulars, not one. A prewash of two slop tanks generates two. This tank-by-tank granularity is what lets a surveyor trace a single parcel of Category X residue from the unloading entry, through the mandatory prewash, to the reception-facility receipt, and confirm that the loop closed. A book that logs operations at the ship level rather than the tank level fails the reconciliation test because the surveyor can’t tie a residue to a destination.
The Appendix 2 form: codes A to K
The Appendix 2 form groups every recordable operation into eleven sections, each denoted by a letter, A through K, with the underlying data points numbered 1 through 37. When the crew makes an entry, three columns carry the skeleton, the date, the code letter, and the item number, and the particulars follow chronologically in the blank space. The structure is fixed by the Annex, so a surveyor who knows the codes can audit any chemical tanker in the world without a manual. This is the depth that the Regulation 13 article cross-links to and does not repeat: the full operational map of the book.
A clarification first, because the field gets it wrong often enough to matter at an inspection. The Annex II Cargo Record Book is a single book. It has no Part I and no Part II. The Part I and Part II split belongs to the Annex I Oil Record Book, where Part I covers machinery-space operations and Part II covers cargo and ballast on oil tankers. Carrying the Oil-Record-Book naming over to the chemical tanker is a common drafting slip, and a PSC officer who hears a chief officer call it the Cargo Record Book Part II reads that as a hint the officer is working from memory rather than the actual Appendix 2 codes. The codes are A to K, not the Annex I A to O, and there is no Part division.
Code A: loading of cargo
Two items. Item 1 records the place of loading. Item 2 identifies the tank or tanks, the name of the substance, and the pollution category. A four-tank load of a single Category Y NLS produces one date, code A, with item 2 repeated per tank or grouped by tank list, and the loading port under item 1. The category is the load-bearing field because everything downstream, the prewash duty, the discharge conditions, the slop-handling route, flows from whether the parcel is X, Y, Z, or other-substance.
Code B: internal transfer of cargo
Items 3 through 6. Item 3 records the name and category of the cargo transferred. Item 4 records the identity of the tanks, the from-tank under 4.1 and the to-tank under 4.2. Item 5 asks whether the source tank was emptied. Item 6 records the quantity remaining if it was not. An internal transfer matters to pollution control because it changes which tank holds which category, and a surveyor reconciling a later prewash needs the transfer history to know why a tank that loaded Category Z now carries a Category X residue.
Code C: unloading of cargo
Items 7 through 11, the densest of the cargo-operation codes. Item 7 records the place of unloading. Item 8 identifies the tanks unloaded. Item 9 asks whether the tanks were emptied: 9.1 requires confirmation that the emptying and stripping followed the P&A Manual procedure, naming the list, trim, and stripping temperature; 9.2 records the quantity remaining if not. Item 10 asks the question the whole reconciliation turns on, whether the P&A Manual requires a prewash with disposal to reception facilities. Item 11 records any failure of the pumping or stripping system, with 11.1 the time and nature of failure, 11.2 the reasons, and 11.3 the time the system was made operational again. Item 10 is the entry a PSC officer reads first on a Category X discharge, because a yes there sets up the mandatory-prewash test, and item 11 is the entry that explains a higher-than-expected residue if the stripping pumps failed.
Code D: mandatory prewash
Items 12 through 14, the entry that documents a Regulation 13 prewash. Item 12 identifies the tank, substance, and category. Item 13 records the washing method: 13.1 the number of cleaning machines per tank, 13.2 the duration of the wash and the washing cycles, 13.3 whether the wash was hot or cold. Item 14 records where the prewash slops went: 14.1 a reception facility in the unloading port, identified; 14.2 a reception facility otherwise, identified. The Code D entry is the proof that the mandatory prewash demanded by item 10 of Code C was actually performed and that the slops reached a reception facility rather than the sea. It reconciles directly against the P&A Manual prewash procedure and against the reception-facility receipt.
Code E: cleaning except mandatory prewash
Items 15 and 16, covering every other tank-cleaning operation, the other prewash operations, the final wash, and ventilation. Item 15 records the time, tank, substance, and category, then states 15.1 the washing procedure, 15.2 the cleaning agent and quantity, 15.3 the ventilation procedure with the number of fans and the duration. Item 16 records where the tank washings went: 16.1 into the sea, 16.2 to a reception facility identified by port, 16.3 to a slops collecting tank identified by tank. The line between Code D and Code E is the line between the prewash the regulation compels and the cleaning the operator chooses, and it matters for liability because only the Code D prewash discharges a Regulation 13 duty.
Code F: discharge into the sea of tank washings
Items 17 through 19. Item 17 identifies the tanks and asks two questions: 17.1 whether washings were discharged during tank cleaning and at what rate, 17.2 whether washings were discharged from a slops collecting tank, with the quantity and rate. Item 18 records the time pumping commenced and stopped. Item 19 records the ship’s speed during the discharge. Code F is the entry a surveyor checks against the Regulation 13 discharge conditions: the ship en route at not less than 7 knots if self-propelled, at least 12 nautical miles from the nearest land, in water at least 25 meters deep, discharging below the waterline. The speed in item 19 and the times in item 18 are the figures that prove or disprove an en-route discharge.
Code G and Code H: ballasting and deballasting
Code G covers ballasting of cargo tanks: item 20 the identity of the tanks ballasted, item 21 the time at start. Code H covers discharge of ballast water from cargo tanks: item 22 the tank identity, item 23 the route of the discharge, 23.1 into the sea or 23.2 to reception facilities by port, item 24 the time the discharge commenced and stopped, item 25 the ship’s speed. Cargo-tank ballast is regulated because a tank that held an NLS and is then ballasted carries residue into the ballast water; a deballast into the sea has to satisfy the same discharge logic as a tank-washing discharge, which is why Code H carries the same speed and timing fields as Code F.
Code I: accidental or exceptional discharge
Items 26 through 28, the entry that satisfies the Regulation 15 duty to record an emergency discharge without delay. Item 26 records the time of occurrence. Item 27 records the approximate quantity, substance, and category. Item 28 records the circumstances of the discharge or escape and general remarks. A discharge to secure the safety of the ship or to save life at sea, the exception preserved by Article 8 of MARPOL and Regulation 6 of Annex II, is recorded here with its justification. A Code I entry is the master’s contemporaneous account, and its absence after a known incident is itself an offense, because the regulation requires the entry without delay, not at the surveyor’s prompting.
Code J: control by authorized surveyors
Items 29 through 37, the surveyor-endorsement section. Item 29 identifies the port. Item 30 identifies the tank, substance, and category discharged ashore. Item 31 asks whether the tanks, pumps, and piping were emptied. Item 32 asks whether the P&A Manual prewash was carried out. Item 33 asks whether the prewash washings were discharged ashore and the tank is empty. Item 34 records that an exemption from mandatory prewash has been granted. Item 35 records the reasons for the exemption. Item 36 carries the name and signature of the authorized surveyor. Item 37 names the organization, company, or government agency the surveyor works for. Code J is the regulator’s signature in the ship’s own record. When an authorized surveyor attends a Category X unloading, witnesses the stripping and the mandatory prewash, and confirms the slops landed ashore, that surveyor endorses Code J, and that endorsement is the strongest single piece of evidence the ship has that the discharge was lawful.
Code K: additional operational procedures and remarks
The open section. Code K carries anything not captured by the structured items: a note that explains an anomaly, a record of an exemption correspondence with the flag administration, a remark on a reception-facility inadequacy logged for a later Regulation 18 report. It is the narrative margin of an otherwise rigidly structured book, and a thin Code K against a complex voyage can itself prompt a closer PSC read because the structured codes rarely capture everything that happened.
Signatures: officer in charge and master
Regulation 15 splits the signature duty deliberately. Each completed operation is signed and dated by the officer or officers in charge of that operation, and where an authorized surveyor witnessed the unloading or prewash, the surveyor signs too. Each completed page is then countersigned by the master. The two-tier signature is not a formality. The officer signature attests that the person who ran the operation made the entry, which is the experience-and-accuracy guarantee. The master signature attests that the master reviewed the page, which is the command-accountability guarantee that places the unlawful-discharge liability on the master and the operator rather than on a junior officer alone.
The practical failure modes are predictable. An operation entered but unsigned is incomplete. A page completed but not countersigned by the master is incomplete. A surveyor-witnessed prewash recorded under Code J without the surveyor signature at item 36 is incomplete, and it is the entry a PSC officer cross-checks against the surveyor’s own report because the two signatures should match the same event. A master who countersigns a page that he plainly couldn’t have reviewed, dated in port while the ship was at sea for instance, hands the surveyor a falsification thread to pull.
Retention, availability, and the place of keeping
The book is retained on board for three years after the last entry has been made. The clock runs from the last entry, not from the book’s opening date, so an active book in daily use never ages out, and a completed book is held the full three years from its final operation. The book is kept in such a place as to be readily available for inspection, which in practice means the cargo control room or the master’s office, not a locked archive ashore. Except for an unmanned ship under tow, the book stays on board. After the three-year on-board period the completed volume is normally archived in the operator’s office and produced to the flag administration on request, and the supporting commercial documents, the bills of lading, the cargo quality certificates, the surveyor reports, and the reception-facility receipts, are kept with it so the evidentiary chain survives.
Readily available is a discharged duty only if the book is current. A book that lags the operations by several port calls, even if every entry is eventually made, fails the prompt-recording requirement and the readily-available requirement at once, because the entries that a PSC officer wants to see, the most recent cargo operations, are the ones not yet written. The discipline is contemporaneous entry, operation by operation, signed as the operation completes.
The prewash and discharge entries: reconciliation against the P&A Manual
The Cargo Record Book and the Procedures and Arrangements Manual are a matched pair, and Regulation 15 only works because the two reconcile. The P&A Manual, approved by the flag administration or its recognized class society under Regulation 14, is the ship-specific document that prescribes how each operation must be done: the stripping procedure for each tank, the prewash cycle pattern, the slop-handling route, the ventilation procedure. The Cargo Record Book records that each operation was done that way. The reconciliation runs item by item.
Take a Category X discharge, the case with the most teeth. Code C item 10 records that the P&A Manual requires a prewash. Code C item 9.1 records that the stripping followed the P&A Manual list, trim, and temperature. Code D item 13 records the washing method, which must match the P&A Manual prewash procedure for that tank. Code D item 14 records the reception facility that received the slops. Code J item 32 records that the surveyor confirmed the prewash was carried out, and item 33 that the washings were landed ashore and the tank is empty. Every one of these entries has a counterpart in the P&A Manual or in an external document. A surveyor reconciling them is testing one proposition: that the Category X residue went ashore and not into the sea.
The exemption case is where the reconciliation gets subtle. Where the unloading port lacks a reception facility able to take the prewash effluent, the flag administration can grant an exemption from the mandatory prewash, recorded at Code J items 34 and 35 with the reasons, and the prewash deferred to the next port with facilities, recorded at Code D item 14.2. The exemption must be in writing and in advance; a Code J item 34 that asserts an exemption with no item 35 reasons and no supporting flag-state correspondence is the entry a PSC officer treats as a self-granted exemption, which is no exemption at all.
The end-point sampling for a Category X prewash, the requirement that the prewash continue until the effluent concentration at the reception-facility inlet is at or below the Regulation 13 limit, is normally witnessed by the independent surveyor attending the discharge. That surveyor’s confirmation feeds Code J. The Cargo Record Book doesn’t carry the sample result as a numbered item, but the Code D and Code J entries together establish that the procedure that produces the result was followed, and the surveyor’s separate report carries the figure.
PSC reconciliation: how a port State control officer reads the book
A port State control inspection of a chemical tanker centers on the Cargo Record Book because it is the one document the ship can’t reconstruct after the fact. The officer boards, examines the Certificate of Fitness or the NLS Certificate, and turns to the book. The reconciliation is a cross-document exercise, and the documents that have to agree are the Cargo Record Book, the cargo documents (the bill of lading, the cargo quality certificate, the ullage report), the P&A Manual, the tank-washing and slops records, and the reception-facility receipts.
The officer works backward from the last cargo. The cargo documents say a parcel of a named NLS was loaded at port X and discharged at port Y. The book’s Code A entry should show that loading with the matching tank, substance, and category. The Code C entry should show the unloading at port Y with the stripping confirmation. If the cargo was Category X, the Code C item 10 should flag the prewash duty, the Code D entry should record the prewash, and the reception-facility receipt should match the Code D item 14 destination by port and quantity. A gap anywhere, a Category X load with no prewash entry, a prewash entry with no reception-facility receipt, a discharge speed in Code F item 19 below 7 knots, a deballast in Code H with no en-route confirmation, is the thread the officer pulls.
The classic improper-discharge signature is a residue that the documents can’t account for. The bill of lading shows a quantity loaded. The unloading entry shows a quantity discharged ashore. The difference is the residue, and that residue has to be traced to a prewash-to-reception entry or to an authorized sea discharge that met the Regulation 13 conditions. A residue that simply disappears from the record, with no Code D landing, no compliant Code F discharge, and no Code I exceptional discharge, is the evidence of an unlawful discharge into the sea. The officer doesn’t need to have watched the discharge; the unaccounted residue in the ship’s own book is the proof.
Falsification is a separate and graver offense. An entry made to misrepresent an operation, a prewash logged that didn’t happen, a reception-facility receipt that doesn’t correspond to a real landing, a discharge speed inflated above the actual, is a falsification of an official record. Under the United States Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships, prosecutions of chemical and oil tankers have frequently turned not on the original discharge but on the false record-book entries made to conceal it, because the false entry is an act committed in the prosecuting State’s waters when the book is presented to the boarding officer. The European Union ship-source pollution regime under Directive 2005/35/EC similarly treats discharge in breach of the MARPOL discharge standards as an infringement subject to penalties. The lesson the chemical-tanker fleet has absorbed is that a true record of a marginal operation is defensible, while a false record of a clean operation is a crime.
The detention itself is grounded in Regulation 16 and in the harmonized PSC procedures applied by the Paris and Tokyo Memoranda of Understanding. A Cargo Record Book deficiency, a missing entry, an unsigned page, an unreconciled residue, is recorded as a deficiency, and where it points to an actual discharge in breach of the Annex it grounds a detention until the deficiency is rectified and, where appropriate, the flag administration is notified.
The quantity audit: how a residue is traced
The reconciliation that catches an unlawful NLS discharge is, at bottom, a quantity audit, and it runs across four numbers a PSC officer can read independently. The bill of lading states the quantity loaded. The ullage and temperature figures at loading, recorded against Code A and the cargo documents, fix the volume in each tank at the start. The outturn figure at discharge, the quantity the receiver acknowledges, fixes what left the ship as cargo. The difference is the residue, the clingage and the stripping shortfall that the tank-washing regime exists to manage. A surveyor who has those four numbers knows how much residue the voyage produced before he reads a single washing entry, and the book then has to account for that residue.
The account closes one of three ways and no other. The residue went ashore as prewash slops, evidenced by the Code D item 14 destination & a reception-facility receipt that matches the port and approximate quantity. The residue was discharged into the sea under the Regulation 13 conditions, evidenced by a Code F entry with a compliant speed at item 19, a position more than 12 nautical miles from land, and a water depth of at least 25 meters. The residue remains on board in a slop tank, evidenced by a Code E item 16.3 transfer to a slops collecting tank that the surveyor can sound. A residue that fits none of these, that the book simply stops mentioning, is the unlawful sea discharge, and the officer doesn’t have to prove the act because the ship’s own numbers prove the gap.
The slop-tank interface is where a careful crew protects itself and a careless one exposes itself. A chemical tanker that can’t land a Category X prewash at the unloading port because the reception facility is unavailable holds the slops on board, records the holding under Code E item 16.3, defers the prewash under an authorized Code J exemption, and lands the slops at the next port with facilities, recorded under Code D item 14.2. The book that walks the residue through that chain, tank to slop tank to reception facility, with the soundings reconciling at each step, is auditable. The book that records a Code D prewash but shows no corresponding slop-tank holding & no reception-facility receipt has logged a prewash whose effluent has no destination, and that is the entry the surveyor treats as evidence the slops went over the side.
The contrast with the Oil Record Book under Annex I
The Cargo Record Book is the chemical-cargo analogue of the Oil Record Book, and the comparison is the fastest way for an officer who knows one to learn the other, with three differences that matter. First, structure. The Annex I Oil Record Book is in two parts: Part I covers machinery-space operations, the bilge, the sludge, the oily-water separator, and is kept by every ship of 400 gross tonnage and above; Part II covers cargo and ballast operations and is kept by oil tankers. The Annex II Cargo Record Book has no such split. It is one book covering NLS cargo and ballast operations, and there is no machinery-space equivalent because the NLS pollution risk is a cargo risk, not an engine-room risk.
Second, the codes. The Oil Record Book Part I uses operational codes A to I and Part II uses codes A to O. The Cargo Record Book uses codes A to K. The letters don’t map across: Code H in the Cargo Record Book is deballasting, while Code H in the Oil Record Book Part I is the disposal of residues. An officer must read the codes against the correct Annex, not by memory of the other book. Third, the substance basis. The Oil Record Book tracks oil by quantity and oil type, with the oil-content-meter readings of the oily-water-separator discharges. The Cargo Record Book tracks NLS by pollution category, X-Y-Z-OS, because the discharge rules and the prewash duty are category-driven rather than quantity-driven.
What the two books share is the architecture that makes them work as evidence: contemporaneous entry without delay, the officer-in-charge signature on each operation, the master countersignature on each page, the three-year on-board retention, and the function as the document a PSC officer reconciles against the cargo and the ship’s procedures. The chemical tanker that also carries oil-like cargoes under a dual certification keeps both books, and the discipline transfers cleanly because the recording habit is identical even though the codes and the categories differ. The shared MARPOL Convention record-keeping logic is deliberate: the convention built the same evidential trap into every annex that controls an operational discharge.
Electronic record books
Since 1 October 2020, the Cargo Record Book may be kept as an approved electronic record book rather than on paper, under the amendments that added the electronic-record-book option to MARPOL and the guidelines in MEPC.312(74). An electronic Cargo Record Book has to be approved by the Administration taking those guidelines into account, has to produce the same Appendix 2 codes and items, and has to be tamper-evident so that an entry can’t be altered after the fact without a trace. The crew still records each operation under the correct code, the system applies the officer and master authentications electronically, and the three-year retention runs the same.
For PSC purposes the electronic book is accepted where the ship can present a declaration from the flag administration approving the specific system. A PSC officer who can’t be shown that declaration is entitled to ask for the records in a form he can examine, and a ship running an unapproved electronic log with no paper fallback exposes itself to a finding. The practical advice the major flags give is to carry the administration’s approval declaration with the system and to keep the ability to export a readable record at the boarding, because the burden of demonstrating the electronic book’s validity sits with the ship.
Common errors in keeping the book
The recurring mistakes are documentary, not operational, and a PSC officer learns to look for them first. Calling the book the Cargo Record Book Part II, importing the Oil-Record-Book Part naming onto a book that has no parts, signals the crew is working from a wrong mental model. Recording operations at the ship level rather than the tank level breaks the Regulation 15.2 tank-to-tank basis and defeats the reconciliation. Leaving Code C item 10 blank on a Category X unloading, the prewash-required question, removes the entry the surveyor most wants. Logging a Code D prewash with no Code D item 14 reception-facility destination leaves the slops unaccounted. Asserting a prewash exemption at Code J item 34 with no item 35 reasons and no flag-state correspondence is a self-exemption with no legal basis.
The signature failures are as common as the content failures. Operations entered without the officer signature. Pages left without the master countersignature. A surveyor-witnessed Code J event with item 36 blank. A book that lags the operations by port calls, so the entries the officer wants are not yet written. Each of these is a discrete deficiency, and a chemical tanker that accumulates several across a single book hands the inspecting State a pattern that supports a closer look at whether the gaps conceal an actual discharge.
The deepest error is treating the book as a compliance chore rather than the ship’s own defense. The book that reconciles cleanly against the cargo documents, the P&A Manual, and the reception-facility receipts is the document that protects the master and the operator when a discharge is questioned. The book that is thin, late, unsigned, or padded with a true-looking entry that the external documents contradict is the document that convicts them. The discipline that distinguishes the two is contemporaneous, tank-level, signed entry that an outside party can audit without the crew’s help.
Limitations
This article states the consolidated Annex II position as adopted by MEPC.118(52) and the Appendix 2 form of the Cargo Record Book with its codes A to K and items 1 to 37. The Annex and its appendices have been amended since 2007, and a ship’s current obligation is governed by the consolidated edition in force on the relevant date together with any later amendments adopted by the IMO Marine Environment Protection Committee; the code letters and item numbers cited here are the Appendix 2 structure and should be checked against the edition current for the ship.
The electronic-record-book provisions summarized here depend on the specific flag administration’s approval and on the guidelines in MEPC.312(74) as amended; a ship running an electronic Cargo Record Book follows its administration’s approval terms, which can be more detailed than the general option described. The enforcement examples drawn from the United States Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships and EU Directive 2005/35/EC illustrate how false record-book entries are prosecuted in two regimes; the legal position in any particular port State is set by that State’s implementing law and is not exhausted by these examples. This article doesn’t reproduce the verbatim regulatory text, and where an operational decision turns on the exact wording, the governing instrument is the consolidated MARPOL Annex II, not this summary. Specific advice on a given ship’s record-keeping is a matter for the flag administration, the recognized organization, and the operator’s designated person.
See also
- MARPOL Annex II: noxious liquid substances
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 12: pumping, piping, and unloading arrangements
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 13: cargo tank washing
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 16: cargo tank arrangement
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 17: SMPEP for NLS
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 18: reception facilities
- MARPOL Convention
- IBC Code
- Chemical tanker
- MARPOL Annex I Regulation 17: Oil Record Book
- Port State control
References
- IMO Resolution MEPC.118(52), Revised MARPOL Annex II, adopted 15 October 2004, in force 1 January 2007, including Regulation 15 (Cargo Record Book) and Appendix 2 (Form of Cargo Record Book).
- International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973, as modified by the Protocol of 1978 (MARPOL 73/78), consolidated Annex II, Regulations 11 to 16 and Appendices 2, 3, and 4.
- IMO Resolution MEPC.312(74), Guidelines for the use of electronic record books under MARPOL.
- Australian Maritime Safety Authority, MARPOL Annex II noxious liquid substances and Cargo Record Book guidance.