Proposal for a Council Recommendation on safety goals and functional requirements for passenger ships below 24 meters in length

Further information:

On 20 December 2017, the amendments to Directive 2009/45/EC entered into force, excluding small passenger ships (i.e. ships below 24 meters in length) from its scope, with effect from 21 December 2019. This resulted from the recommendations of the Regulatory Fitness and Performance Programme (REFIT) Fitness Check on EU passenger ship safety legislation.

Directive 2009/45/EC has brought about a common high safety level across the EU and important internal market benefits. However, it failed to do so regarding small ships (below 24 meters in length) for which several key safety aspects have not been harmonised (reflecting the difficulty to apply the current prescriptive standards in a common manner to the large variety of small ships and conditions they operate in throughout the EU). It also became clear that the wide range of services that these vessels are built for produces a very broad range of designs and technical solutions. This made identifying a common set of detailed rules extremely challenging and necessitated a different regulatory approach.

The proposed safety goals and functional requirements for small passenger ships below 24 meters in length provide for recommended principles for the safety of these vessels that would, if embraced by Member States and further developed, pave the way for a more common approach as regards safety for small passenger ships operating on domestic voyages within EU waters.

EUR-Lex: SWD(2018)238: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the proposal https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2018:238:FIN

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