A port-State control officer boarding a tanker that carries bulk chemicals looks for one document before almost any other: the certificate that says the flag State has surveyed this ship and found it fit, under MARPOL Annex II, to carry the cargo on board. On a parcel tanker built to the IBC Code that document is the International Certificate of Fitness for the Carriage of Dangerous Chemicals in Bulk. On a ship that carries noxious liquid substances in bulk but is not a full IBC chemical tanker, it is the International Pollution Prevention Certificate for the Carriage of Noxious Liquid Substances in Bulk, the NLS Certificate. The rule that issues and endorses that second document is Regulation 9 of the revised MARPOL Annex II, adopted by Resolution MEPC.118(52) on 15 October 2004 and in force since 1 January 2007.
Regulation 9 is short, and most of its weight is in two ideas. The first is that the NLS Certificate is the flag State’s attestation, to every other Party to the Convention, that the ship has passed the Regulation 8 survey regime and meets the Annex. The second, which trips up readers who treat the certificate types as interchangeable, is that the NLS Certificate and the IBC Code Certificate of Fitness are not both issued to the same ship. Regulation 7 of the Annex makes the Certificate of Fitness do the NLS Certificate’s job for an IBC chemical tanker, so the two documents are alternatives, not a pair. This article works through the issuing rule, the certificate’s form and supplement, the language requirement, and the certificate-of-fitness relationship that the rest of the certification scheme depends on.
Where Regulation 9 sits in Annex II
The revised Annex II groups its survey-and-certification rules into Chapter 3, “Surveys and certification,” running from Regulation 7 to Regulation 10. The order matters because the rules cross-reference each other by number, and the consolidated text renumbered everything in the 2004 revision. Regulation 7 is titled “Survey and certification of chemical tankers.” Regulation 8 is “Surveys.” Regulation 9 is “Issue or endorsement of Certificate.” Regulation 10 is “Duration and validity of Certificate.” Read in that sequence, the chapter tells a single story: a chemical tanker certified to the IBC Code is carved out at the front (Regulation 7), the survey events that earn the certificate are defined next (Regulation 8), the certificate itself is issued and endorsed in the middle (Regulation 9), and its life is then bounded (Regulation 10).
That numbering is worth fixing in mind, because secondary sources scramble it. UK statutory instruments that implement Annex II use a domestic “regulation 9” to mean the issuing provision for both the NLS Certificate and the International Certificate of Fitness, and a casual reader can mistake the UK regulation number for the Annex II number. They are different numbering schemes. Inside the treaty text itself, as consolidated from MEPC.118(52), Regulation 9 is unambiguously “Issue or endorsement of Certificate,” and Regulation 8 cross-refers to it five times, each time naming “the Certificate issued under regulation 9 of this Annex.” Some existing summaries, including older internal cross-references, call the certification rule “Regulation 11.” That is wrong for the consolidated Annex: Regulation 11 of the revised Annex II is the design, construction and equipment provision, not the rule that issues the certificate, and the IBC and BCH Code carve-out for chemical tankers is Regulation 7.
Regulation 9 does not stand alone. It consumes the survey work in Regulation 8, it hands its output to Regulation 10 for validity, and it is overridden, for one class of ship, by Regulation 7. Getting the certificate right means reading those four regulations together. The cargo side of the chain runs back to Regulation 6 categorization, because the products a ship may carry under its certificate are the ones whose category and hazard profile its ship type, tank arrangement and equipment can match.
What Regulation 9 says
The rule opens by stating who gets the certificate and when. An International Pollution Prevention Certificate for the Carriage of Noxious Liquid Substances in Bulk shall be issued, after an initial or renewal survey in accordance with Regulation 8, to any ship intended to carry noxious liquid substances in bulk and which is engaged on voyages to ports or terminals under the jurisdiction of other Parties to the Convention. Three conditions are stacked into that sentence. The survey must come first, and it must be the initial or renewal survey, not an annual or intermediate one. The ship must be intended to carry NLS in bulk. And the certificate’s purpose is international: it is for a ship on voyages to other Parties’ ports, which is why it is an “international” certificate and why a purely domestic NLS carrier on national voyages sits outside the Regulation 9 duty and under its flag State’s own rules instead.
Regulation 9.2 fixes the issuing authority. The certificate shall be issued or endorsed either by the Administration or by any person or organization duly authorized by it, and in every case the Administration assumes full responsibility for the Certificate. That single clause carries the whole delegation architecture of modern flag-State practice. Almost no flag administration surveys its own chemical tankers and noxious-liquid carriers directly. The work is delegated to a recognized organization, typically a classification society acting under the IMO Code for Recognized Organizations, the RO Code, which the revised Annex incorporates as mandatory through Regulation 8.2.2. The RO surveys, the RO issues the certificate on the flag State’s behalf, and the flag State keeps the legal responsibility. That is the meaning of “the Administration assumes full responsibility”: delegation of the act, not of the accountability.
The middle of the rule covers a request from one flag State to another. Under Regulation 9.3, the Government of a Party may, at the request of the Administration, cause a ship to be surveyed and, if satisfied that the Annex is complied with, issue or authorize the issue of the NLS Certificate to the ship, and where appropriate endorse it. A copy of the certificate and of the survey report goes back to the requesting Administration as soon as possible. A certificate issued this way carries a statement that it was issued at the request of the flag State, and it then has the same force and receives the same recognition as one the flag State issued itself. This is the inter-Administration issuing route: a Panama-flagged ship in a European yard can be certified by the host State at Panama’s request, which keeps a ship from being stranded because its own flag has no surveyor at the port.
Regulation 9.3.4 closes the rule with a hard limit. No NLS Certificate shall be issued to a ship entitled to fly the flag of a State which is not a Party to the Convention. The certificate is, at root, a Party’s promise to other Parties; it has no addressee and no meaning for a flag outside MARPOL. A non-Party ship cannot buy its way into recognition by getting another State to issue the certificate, because that other State has no flag-State authority over it. This is the certificate-level expression of MARPOL’s no-more-favorable-treatment principle, which runs through port-State control: a non-Party ship is inspected to the same standard but cannot hold the Party certificate.
The form: Appendix 3 and the supplement
Regulation 9.4 sets the physical form. The NLS Certificate shall be drawn up in the form corresponding to the model given in Appendix 3 to the Annex, and shall be at least in English, French or Spanish. The Appendix 3 model is a fixed two-part instrument. The first part is the certificate proper: a single page that names the ship, its flag State, IMO number, port of registry and gross tonnage, states the survey on which it was issued, and certifies that the ship has been surveyed in accordance with Regulation 8 and that the survey showed the structure, equipment, systems, fittings, arrangements and material fully comply with the applicable requirements of the Annex. It carries the issue date, the expiry date, the place and date of issue, and the signature and seal of the issuing official or RO. Down its lower face runs the endorsement grid where the annual and intermediate surveys are signed off through the certificate’s five-year life.
The second part is where the operational detail lives. Appended to the certificate is a “Record of Construction and Equipment for the Carriage of Noxious Liquid Substances in Bulk,” the supplement. It is not optional and the certificate is incomplete without it. The supplement records the ship’s category for NLS carriage, the products it is approved to carry, the cargo-tank and pump-room arrangements, the discharge and stripping performance against the Regulation 12 stripping limits, the prewash and ventilation provisions, the tank-washing and slop arrangements, and the equivalents or exemptions the Administration has granted. Where the IBC Code Certificate of Fitness carries its own product list in its attached record, the NLS Certificate carries the equivalent list in this supplement. A PSC officer checking which cargoes a ship may load reads the supplement, not the face of the certificate, because the face says only that the ship is fit; the supplement says fit for what.
The supplement is the document that ties the certificate back to the rest of the Annex. Its cargo list reflects the ship type and the cargo-tank arrangement the ship satisfies, so a product appears on the list only if the ship’s protective location, tank materials and equipment match what that product’s category and hazard profile demand. Its prewash and discharge entries mirror what the ship’s approved Procedures and Arrangements Manual sets out under Regulation 14. Its stripping figures are the surveyed performance the Regulation 12 pumping and piping rule requires. Change any of those, by converting a tank, adding a product, or refitting the discharge system, and the supplement, and so the certificate, has to be re-endorsed or reissued.
The language requirement
Regulation 9.4’s language floor is a recognition mechanism, not a formality. The certificate must be in at least one of English, French or Spanish, the three working languages in which Parties can be expected to read each other’s certificates without translation. A flag State may add its own national language, and many do; a certificate from a Spanish-flag ship will commonly carry parallel Spanish and English text. Where the entries are also in an official national language of the flag State, that national-language text governs in the case of a dispute only where the model or the Annex so provides. The practical point for a foreign PSC officer is that the English, French or Spanish text is the version the officer is entitled to rely on, and a certificate produced only in a national language outside the three is not in compliant form.
The same three-language floor runs through the harmonized certificate set, because Annex II’s survey-and-certification scheme was aligned with the SOLAS Convention and the other MARPOL Annexes under the Harmonized System of Survey and Certification. The NLS Certificate, the IOPP Certificate under Annex I, the IAPP Certificate under Annex VI, and the SOLAS safety certificates all share the five-year cycle, the annual and intermediate endorsement pattern, and the English-French-Spanish language rule, so a single survey attendance can renew several certificates at once. That alignment is the reason a chemical tanker’s certificate dates tend to move together, and the reason a flag State will sometimes shift an anniversary date so the harmonized certificates expire on one day.
Regulation 7 and the Certificate of Fitness: the relationship to get right
This is the part the topic turns on, and it is the part most often stated loosely. A chemical tanker built and certified to the IBC Code does not hold an NLS Certificate. It holds the International Certificate of Fitness for the Carriage of Dangerous Chemicals in Bulk, and that Certificate of Fitness covers Annex II compliance within it. The mechanism is Regulation 7, not Regulation 9.
Regulation 7, “Survey and certification of chemical tankers,” reads that notwithstanding the provisions of Regulations 8, 9 and 10 of the Annex, chemical tankers which have been surveyed and certified by States Parties in accordance with the provisions of the International Bulk Chemical Code or the Bulk Chemical Code, as applicable, shall be deemed to have complied with the provisions of the said regulations, and the certificate issued under that Code shall have the same force and receive the same recognition as the certificate issued under Regulation 9. Parse that carefully. The IBC-certified ship is “deemed to have complied” with Regulations 8, 9 and 10, the whole survey-issue-validity chain. Its Certificate of Fitness is given “the same force and the same recognition” as the NLS Certificate. So the Certificate of Fitness is not an additional document the chemical tanker holds alongside an NLS Certificate; it is the document that stands in the NLS Certificate’s place. A separate NLS Certificate is not issued.
The reason is that the IBC Code certification is the stricter and more complete of the two. The IBC Code, made mandatory under both SOLAS and MARPOL for chemical tankers built on or after 1 July 1986, governs the construction, equipment, ship type, tank materials, cargo containment, fire protection and pollution prevention of a chemical tanker in one instrument. Its Certificate of Fitness, issued under Chapter 1 of the Code, certifies the ship against all of that, including the Annex II pollution requirements, and carries an attached record of the products the ship may carry. Issuing an NLS Certificate on top would be issuing a narrower pollution-only certificate to a ship that already holds a broader one that subsumes it. Regulation 7 removes the redundancy by making the broader certificate count for the narrower one.
The dividing line is which products the ship carries. A ship carrying products listed as Category X, Y or Z under IBC Code Chapter 17, the noxious-liquid cargoes the Code controls, must hold a Certificate of Fitness under the IBC or BCH Code, and that certificate then serves for Annex II. A ship that carries noxious liquid substances in bulk but is not a Chapter 17 chemical tanker, for instance a ship certified for a narrower NLS slate, takes the NLS Certificate route under Regulation 9. A ship carrying only products listed as Other Substances (OS) under IBC Code Chapter 18 needs no Annex II certification at all, because OS cargoes fall outside the noxious-liquid restriction. So the certificate a ship holds is read off its cargo list: full chemical-tanker NLS slate to a Certificate of Fitness, narrower NLS carriage to an NLS Certificate, OS-only to neither.
The older BCH Code, the non-mandatory Code for the Construction and Equipment of Ships Carrying Dangerous Chemicals in Bulk, applies to chemical tankers built before 1 July 1986, and its Certificate of Fitness has the same standing under Regulation 7 for those older ships. Gas carriers reach a parallel result by a different route. Under Regulation 5.3 of the Annex, a gas carrier certified under the IGC Code is deemed equivalent to the construction and equipment requirements of Regulations 11 and 12 for the NLS products also listed in the Gas Carrier Code, provided it holds a Certificate of Fitness under that Code, holds an NLS Certificate certifying that it may carry only those listed substances, and meets the segregated-ballast, residue and manual conditions the rule sets. So a gas carrier that also lifts a small slate of noxious liquids can hold both certificates, which is the one common case where the NLS Certificate sits beside a Certificate of Fitness rather than being replaced by it.
For a PSC officer or a charterer’s vetting inspector, the operational rule is simple once the relationship is clear. On a parcel chemical tanker, ask for the International Certificate of Fitness and read its attached product list; there is no NLS Certificate to find and its absence is not a deficiency. On a ship presented as an NLS carrier that is not an IBC chemical tanker, ask for the NLS Certificate and read its Record of Construction and Equipment. Recording a deficiency against a chemical tanker for “no NLS Certificate” is a known inspection error that flows from missing Regulation 7. The ship is fully certified; the certificate just has a different name.
How the certificate is earned: the Regulation 8 survey cycle
Regulation 9 issues the certificate, but Regulation 8 is what the certificate stands on. The survey events feed Regulation 9 and 10 directly, so a working grasp of the certificate means knowing the cycle that endorses it. Regulation 8 sets five survey types for a ship carrying NLS in bulk. An initial survey before the certificate is issued for the first time, covering the structure, equipment, systems, fittings, arrangements and material in full so far as the ship is covered by the Annex. A renewal survey at intervals set by the Administration but not exceeding five years, which earns the new certificate. An intermediate survey within three months before or after the second or third anniversary of the certificate, covering the equipment and the associated pump and piping systems. An annual survey within three months before or after each anniversary, a general inspection that the ship has been maintained. And an additional survey after a repair or important renewal.
The annual and intermediate surveys are endorsed on the certificate issued under Regulation 9; the regulation says so in those words. That endorsement is what keeps the certificate alive between renewals. A certificate with no endorsement for a survey that has fallen due, or with an endorsement dated outside the three-month anniversary window, is a certificate that has lapsed in substance even if its printed expiry date is still in the future. PSC officers read the endorsement grid as closely as the expiry date for exactly this reason. The five-year renewal interval and the anniversary-based annual and intermediate pattern are the survey spine of the revised Annex II definitions and application that frame the whole certification scheme.
The survey is the point where the recognized organization enters. Regulation 8.2.1 lets the Administration entrust surveys to nominated surveyors or to recognized organizations, and 8.2.2 ties that delegation to the RO Code. The RO that surveys is usually the RO that then issues or endorses the certificate under Regulation 9.2, so the two regulations operate as one continuous act in practice: a class surveyor attends, the survey passes, and the same RO signs the certificate on the flag State’s behalf. Regulation 8.2.5 gives the surveyor or RO the duty to ensure corrective action and, failing that, to see the certificate withdrawn and the Administration notified, which is the back-stop that keeps an unfit ship from sailing on a live certificate.
The condition-maintenance duties in Regulation 8.3 are the other half of keeping the certificate honest between surveys. Under 8.3.1 the ship and its equipment must be maintained to conform with the Annex so the ship remains fit to proceed to sea without an unreasonable threat to the marine environment. Under 8.3.2, after a survey, no change may be made to the structure, equipment, systems, fittings, arrangements or material the survey covered, without the Administration’s sanction, except the direct replacement of equipment and fittings. So a tank coating change, a pump swap to a different type, or a piping modification is not a maintenance matter the crew can carry out and forget; it is a change the flag State or its RO must sanction, and one that may force a re-endorsement of the certificate’s supplement. Regulation 8.3.3 then sets the reporting duty: whenever an accident or a defect substantially affects the ship’s integrity or the completeness of its Annex II equipment, the master or owner must report it at the earliest opportunity to the Administration, the RO or the nominated surveyor responsible for issuing the certificate, who decides whether a survey is needed. The reporting chain runs back to whoever holds the certificate, because a defect that the survey would have caught is, in effect, a hole in the certificate’s attestation.
The additional survey under Regulation 8.1.5 is where those duties land. After a repair following an 8.3.3 investigation, or whenever important repairs or renewals are made, an additional survey, general or partial according to the circumstances, confirms the repairs were effectively made and the ship complies in all respects. The additional survey does not run on the anniversary calendar; it is event-driven, triggered by the repair, and its result is endorsed on the certificate alongside the scheduled survey entries. A chemical tanker that drydocks for a steel renewal in a cargo tank, or replaces a cargo pump, will commonly take an additional survey before it returns to NLS service, and the certificate carries the endorsement that records it. This is the mechanism that keeps the certificate matched to the ship’s actual condition rather than to its condition on the last anniversary date.
Duration, validity, and the endorsement chain (Regulation 10)
The Regulation 10 duration-and-validity rule bounds the life of the certificate that Regulation 9 issues, and the two are read together so often that the certificate’s validity is part of understanding the issue itself. The NLS Certificate is issued for a period the Administration sets, not exceeding five years. The renewal mechanics in Regulation 10.2 then handle the seam between one certificate and the next. When the renewal survey is completed within three months before the existing certificate’s expiry, the new certificate runs from the survey completion to a date not exceeding five years from the old expiry, so the cycle stays anchored to the original anniversary. When the renewal survey is completed after expiry, the new certificate still dates from survey completion but to not more than five years from the old expiry. When it is completed more than three months early, the new certificate dates from survey completion to not more than five years from that completion, which resets the anniversary.
Regulation 10 also provides the short grace periods that keep ships trading. If a renewal survey is done but the new certificate cannot be issued or placed on board before the old one expires, the authorized RO may endorse the existing certificate, and it is then accepted as valid for up to five more months. If a ship is not in its survey port when the certificate expires, the Administration may extend validity, but only to let the ship complete its voyage to the survey port, and only where it is proper to do so, for no more than three months. These are tightly bounded exceptions, not a general extension power. The one named special-circumstances case, in Regulation 10.7, lets a new certificate be dated up to five years from the renewal-survey completion rather than from the old expiry, which is the mechanism a flag State uses to harmonize a ship’s certificate dates onto a single anniversary.
The link back to Regulation 9 is the endorsement. A certificate issued under Regulation 9 carries, through its life, the survey endorsements that Regulation 8 requires and the validity that Regulation 10 sets. The three regulations are one instrument viewed at three moments: issued (9), endorsed and kept current (8), and bounded in time (10). A certificate that has been issued correctly but not endorsed on schedule, or that has run past its Regulation 10 validity, is no longer the attestation Regulation 9 created, and the ship is, for Annex II purposes, uncertified.
What the certificate attests, and what it does not
The NLS Certificate is a statement about one thing: that the ship has been surveyed under Annex II and found fit, on the survey date, to carry the noxious liquid substances listed in its supplement. It is not a statement that the ship is currently operating in compliance, that its Cargo Record Book entries are correct, or that its last discharge was lawful. Those are operational matters the certificate does not reach. The split matters at inspection. A valid certificate and a clean endorsement grid tell a PSC officer the ship’s hardware and approvals are in order; they say nothing about whether the crew actually prewashed the last Category X tank or logged the discharge. The operational check runs through the Cargo Record Book and the approved Procedures and Arrangements Manual, not through the certificate.
The certificate also does not set the discharge rules; it presupposes them. The discharge regime a category triggers, the prewash duty for a Category X residue, the at-sea conditions for a permitted discharge, all live in the Regulation 13 cargo-tank washing rule, and the certificate’s supplement records only that the ship has the arrangements to meet them. The reception-facility connections the prewash regime depends on are a Regulation 18 reception-facility matter. The shipboard response plan the ship must keep for an NLS spill is the Regulation 17 SMPEP, not anything the certificate carries. The certificate is the gate at the front; the operational regulations are what the ship does once through it. The survey events that earn and endorse the certificate are themselves a separate rule, the Regulation 8 survey scheme.
One more boundary is worth stating because it is a common conflation. The Annex II category of a cargo and the certificate are linked but distinct. The category, set by Regulation 6 from the GESAMP hazard profile, decides how harmful the cargo is to the sea and so what ship type and arrangements it demands. The certificate’s supplement then lists the products the ship is approved to carry, which is the set of cargoes whose category and profile the ship’s surveyed ship type, tank arrangement and equipment can match. So the category drives the ship type, the ship type drives the structure surveyed, and the certificate names the cargoes the structure supports. Reading a product off the supplement is reading the end of that chain, not the start of it.
The certificate in the flag-State and class structure
Regulation 9.2’s “issued or endorsed either by the Administration or by any person or organization duly authorized by it” is the hinge that connects the certificate to the whole flag-and-class system. The flag State, the Administration in MARPOL terms, holds the treaty obligation. It delegates the survey and the certificate to a recognized organization under the RO Code, adopted as MEPC.237(65) and made mandatory under Annex II by the amendments in MEPC.238(65), in force 1 January 2015. The RO is in practice a member of the International Association of Classification Societies or a comparable society, and it surveys and certifies under a written authorization from the flag State that the Administration must notify to the IMO for circulation to other Parties.
The “in every case the Administration assumes full responsibility for the Certificate” clause is the legal core of that arrangement. The flag State cannot delegate away its responsibility for the certificate’s correctness; it delegates only the act of surveying and signing. If an RO issues an NLS Certificate to a ship that should not have had one, the flag State answers for it, which is why a flag State’s RO oversight programme, its monitoring of the societies it authorizes, is itself a subject of IMO audit. The certificate is the visible end of a chain of responsibility that runs flag State, to RO authorization, to surveyor attendance, to the signature on the Appendix 3 form.
For the inter-Administration case in Regulation 9.3, the structure is the same with one party added. The requesting flag State still owns the responsibility; the issuing State acts on its request and transmits the certificate and survey report back. The certificate carries the statement that it was issued at the flag State’s request, which preserves the line of responsibility on the document’s face. This is the route used when a ship changes flag, or is delivered or repaired in a State other than its flag, and it keeps the certificate available without breaking the flag State’s accountability for it.
Common errors at the certificate
A handful of mistakes recur often enough to name. The first is treating the NLS Certificate and the Certificate of Fitness as a pair a chemical tanker should both hold. It should not; Regulation 7 makes them alternatives, and recording “no NLS Certificate” against an IBC chemical tanker is a false deficiency. The second is reading the certificate’s printed expiry date without reading the endorsement grid, and so missing a lapsed annual or intermediate survey that has invalidated the certificate inside its nominal five years. The third is checking the certificate’s face for the approved cargo list, which is not there: the products live in the attached Record of Construction and Equipment, the supplement, and a certificate without its supplement is incomplete.
The fourth is assuming a non-Party flag can hold the certificate. Regulation 9.3.4 forbids issuing it to a non-Party ship, so a certificate purporting to do so is not a valid Annex II certificate, and the ship is handled under no-more-favorable-treatment instead. The fifth is confusing the UK or other domestic statutory regulation numbers with the Annex II numbers, and so citing the wrong rule for the issuing power. Inside the treaty the issuing rule is Regulation 9; the design, construction and equipment rule is Regulation 11; the chemical-tanker carve-out that lets the IBC and BCH Code certification stand in is Regulation 7. The sixth, narrower, is overlooking the gas-carrier case under Regulation 5.3, where a ship genuinely can hold both an NLS Certificate and an IGC Code Certificate of Fitness, so the “never both” rule for IBC chemical tankers does not carry across to gas carriers without qualification.
How Regulation 9 fits the wider Annex II regime
Regulation 9 is the certification node in a chain that starts at the cargo and ends at the inspection. Regulation 6 categorizes a noxious liquid substance from its GESAMP hazard profile. The category and full profile set the IBC Code ship type, which sets the structure the ship must have. The Regulation 8 survey confirms the structure. Regulation 9 then issues the certificate that attests to it, with the approved products named in the supplement, and Regulation 10 bounds its life. Regulation 7 lets an IBC chemical tanker satisfy the same node with its Certificate of Fitness. Once the ship is certified, the operational regulations take over: Regulation 12 on pumping and stripping, Regulation 13 on discharge and prewash, Regulation 14 on the Procedures and Arrangements Manual, Regulation 15 on the Cargo Record Book, Regulation 11 on the cargo-tank arrangement and protective location, and Regulation 18 on reception facilities.
The wider frame is the MARPOL Convention itself, with Annex II as the noxious-liquid-substance annex sitting beside Annex I for oil and Annex VI for air. The certificate’s harmonized five-year cycle, its annual and intermediate endorsement pattern, and its three-language floor are shared across those annexes and the SOLAS Convention certificates under the Harmonized System of Survey and Certification, which is why a chemical tanker’s statutory certificates are surveyed and renewed together. The whole structure exists to give port-State control a document to check: the NLS Certificate, or the Certificate of Fitness standing in its place, is the first thing a PSC officer reads, and reading it correctly starts with knowing which document the ship should hold and why.
For the broader picture of the Annex, its discharge regime, its categories and its operational rules, the MARPOL Annex II hub is the overview; this article goes deep on the one regulation that turns a passed survey into the certificate the ship sails on.
Limitations
This article describes the issuing and endorsement rule and its relationship to the IBC Code Certificate of Fitness, not the full survey procedure or the operational regime. The exact survey scope, the anniversary windows, and the additional-survey triggers are the subject of Regulation 8, and the at-sea discharge conditions and prewash end-point are the subject of Regulation 13; this article references those rules to show how the certificate fits, not to restate them. The dedicated articles on those regulations carry the detail.
The certificate type a specific ship holds must be confirmed against the ship and its flag-State arrangements, not inferred from a general description here. An IBC chemical tanker holds a Certificate of Fitness that covers Annex II; a narrower NLS carrier holds an NLS Certificate; a gas carrier may hold both under Regulation 5.3; an OS-only carrier holds neither. The dividing lines turn on the ship’s cargo list and its date of construction, and the controlling document is the ship’s actual certificate with its attached record, read against the current IBC Code and the flag State’s authorization to the issuing recognized organization.
The regulation numbers and certificate provisions stated here are those of the consolidated revised Annex II adopted by MEPC.118(52), in force since 1 January 2007, as amended. The Annex is amended periodically through the MEPC, and the RO Code incorporation, the harmonized-survey alignment, and the certificate model have all been revised since 2007. Treat the specific paragraph numbers and the Appendix 3 form here as a guide to the structure of the rule, and verify the current text against the consolidated Annex II and the relevant MEPC resolution before relying on it operationally. Nothing here replaces the ship’s approved documents, the flag State’s instructions to its recognized organizations, and the responsible officer’s check against the current Annex.
See also
- MARPOL Annex II: control of pollution by noxious liquid substances
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 6: NLS categorization (X/Y/Z/OS)
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 8: surveys of NLS ships
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 10: certificate duration and validity
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 13: cargo-tank washing and discharge
- MARPOL Annex II Regulation 11: cargo-tank arrangement
- IBC Code: construction and equipment of chemical tankers
- Chemical tanker: types and carriage requirements
- Classification society and recognized organizations
- Port-State control
- MARPOL Convention: the pollution-prevention treaty