The International Maritime Organization and regime interaction: cooperation or hegemony?

Abstract

Regime interaction is an expected consequence of the specialisation and expansion of international law. It occurs regularly, including during law-making processes, authoritative legal interpretations, and international organisations’ activities. This study shows that, while international organisations contribute to the coordination among international legal regimes, such coordination has limitations. The author illustrates such limitations with two examples. One relates to ship recycling and the cooperation between the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the subsidiary bodies of the Basel Convention on Transboundary Movement of Wastes (Basel Convention). The other relates to the rescue of migrants at sea and disembarkation to a place of safety and the cooperation between the IMO and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). There is an asymmetrical relationship between these organisations, and the IMO, as the more powerful organisation, has upheld its normative agenda, narrative, ideology, and power structure while cooperating with the Basel Convention’s subsidiary bodies and UNHCR. Such asymmetrical relations have a negative impact on legal cross-fertilisation, ie fragmentation and tunnel vision. On the one hand, the ship-recycling case illustrates legal fragmentation, where two parallel and distinct legal regulations, ie the Basel Convention and the International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, are potentially applicable to ships at the end of their operative lives. On the other hand, the rescue of migrants at sea exemplifies tunnel vision where this particular issue has been framed as a maritime safety matter, leaving little room for cross-fertilisation with refugee law.