Flag State Representative

Every merchant ship needs to be registered to a state of its choice. The ship is then bound to carry the flag of that state and also follow the rules and regulations enforced by the same. The ship’s flag is an important factor when the court makes the decision on the judging.

The ship will follow the regulation of the flag state nation’s maritime law in the open sea and it will also avail different protections and preferential treatments as tax, certification, and security etc as per the flag state benefits.

Ship registration plays an important role in many aspects such as vessel purchases, newbuilding deliveries, financing, vessel leasing, and different priorities of owners and mortgagees.

The term Flag State came to existence because of the usage of flags as the symbol of the nationality or tribe the ships belong to from the early days. The flag has come to be an officially sanctioned and very powerful symbol of the State and is the visible evidence of the nationality conferred by the State upon ships registered under its national law. The ship’s flag displays the nationality of the ship, under whose laws the ship is plying in the international waters.

n order to ensure that the flag state for ships itself possess the necessary resources to carry out the policy of safe and secure shipping, the IMO has come up with a unique system. The system involves the flag states themselves to ascertain their levels of competency and thereafter present a detailed report about the same to the organisation. While this promises to be an interesting method, the only loophole is that there is no base level against which all flag states can measure themselves. However, port state control (PSC) inspections and other methods are used to improve the standard of the ships to a great extent.