Community of Reporting for The Gulf of Guinea
PIRACY and armed robbery as a crime continues to be a concern to the shipping industry, states the International Maritime Bureau Piracy Reporting Centre (IMB PRC). A structured response by governments and their response agencies is critical to address this crime.
At the same time, however, the shipping industry needs to be comfortable to report incidents and be confident that their reports will be actioned. Unfortunately, the latter has not been forthcoming, especially from the Gulf of Guinea region for several years.
This endeavour encourages all agencies, governmental and non-governmental, response agencies, commercial operators, etc to share reports available to them with the IMB - in confidence. The IMB has undertaken to collate and present these figures in its reports.
As different agencies define and categorise incidents differently, the IMB proposes to collate these under three generic levels — I, II, III. The types of incidents, which will fall under these headings will be defined by the effect the incident has on the crew, vessel and cargo.
Level I: Any incident which has a direct impact on the crew. To include:
a. Crew being take hostage, injured, killed, kidnapped, missing, threatened;
b. Hijacking where the command of the ship has been taken over by those boarding the vessel;
c. An incident where the crew retreats into the citadel.
Level II: To include a vessel being fired upon, security teams firing on an approaching threat, robbers/pirates identified with weapons of any type (violence is offered) whether boarded or otherwise.
Level III: To include an incident that does not fall into either Level I or Level II.
Table below shows the level of under-reporting by comparing figures available from the Community of Reporting as compared with those reported directly to the IMB.
Total incidents received by IMB versus Community of Reporting (CoR) incidents for Gulf of Guinea region, January - June 2016 & 2017.
As a maritime domain information sharing operator, OCEANUSLive provides verifid reports with IMB and OBP for all high risk regions. OCEANUSLive reports feature in OBP Annual Reports.
Source: IMB PRC
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Submitted by Team@oceanuslive.org