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ENDS Daily

A working group under the UN convention on trade in hazardous waste has agreed to tackle the issue of industrialised country exports of ships for scrapping in Asia. Following two-weeks of negotiations of a number of working groups to the Basel Convention which ended on Friday, the group called on the convention secretariat to work in cooperation with the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) to address the problem. It also calls for a working group on legal matters to study how the partial and full dismantling of ships is dealt with by the convention. European environmentalists and the Basel Action Network (BAN) recently claimed that the convention clearly forbade the exportation of ships containing toxic materials for scrapping in non-OECD countries (ENDS Daily 18 November 1998). According to a BAN report on the latest convention meeting, all parties except India, Pakistan and China - which have a large ship scrapping industry - considered the matter to be "an issue of some urgency".

The meeting also made progress on drafting a text for a protocol on liability and compensation. According to officials at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the discussions were characterised by a "spirit of cooperation," which makes it likely that the protocol will be adopted at the next conference of the parties to the convention, to be held this December in Geneva. A UNEP spokesperson told ENDS Daily that outstanding grey areas relating to scope, the level of compensation and emergency funds would be discussed at a working group meeting at the end of August.