By Toby McIntosh
The International Maritime Organization Council has decided to live-stream its meetings, but with a major caveat – the feed will be turned off when voting occurs.
The step into virtual sunlight, along with the shadow, continues a long-standing IMO practice of not disclosing how the 40 Council members vote.
Nevertheless. the new live-streaming policy will allow the public to observe Council meetings for the first time.
The Council is the IMO’s key decision-making body, usually meeting two or three times a year for sessions lasting about five days. Council recommendations are ratified by the Assembly, which meets once every two years with representation from all 175 IMO members. The actions on Council transparency came at a meeting concluded July 12, according to an IMO July 18 press release.
Besides allowing the black-out for voting, the Council reserved the right not to broadcast discussions concerning the appointment of a Secretary-General or “any other discussion that the Council may decide should not be live-streamed.”
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Live Streaming on YouTube
The live-streaming will occur on the IMOHQ YouTube channel, which has videos of the last Assembly meeting. In July of 2023, the Council endorsed the recommendation of a Working Group on Council Reform that plenary meetings of the Assembly should be live-streamed beginning with the 33rd Assembly (27 November to 6 December 2023),” according to an IMO press release.
The IMO does not live-stream the meetings of IMO committees, such as the Marine Environment Protection Committee, where much of the substantive policy negotiations occur. However, the YouTube channel does have videos of conferences and seminars.
The IMO announcement specified, “Meetings of working, drafting, review, expert, intersessional and editing groups will not be live-streamed.”
Looking ahead, the press release said, “Live-streaming in all six working languages of IMO will be considered as part of the Council’s work on the enhancement of multilingualism.”
In addition, the IMO said, “The Council agreed to permanently establish the use of hybrid capabilities to support in-person meetings and to review its Rules of Procedure accordingly. It invited the other IMO organs to do the same.”
During COVID, the IMO and other international organizations held more virtual meetings, but usually without expanding public access to the meetings or related documents. (See EYE April 20, 2020 article and April 28, 2020 article.)
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has lagged behind the IMO on transparency. The ICAO press office did not reply to a request for information on any planned moves on transparency.
The IMO’s sensitivity about its proceedings has surfaced before.
In 2020, an IMO committee chairman admonished delegates, and the media, to refrain from live-tweeting while attending at a virtual committee meeting on shipping and the environment. An anonymous tweeter had disclosed contemporaneously how countries were voting. (See EYE article.)
Also, despite criticisms from journalists, the IMO still has a rule that while statements made at meetings may be quoted, “individual speakers will not be named without their prior consent.”
Document Rule Liberalized, but Disclosure Is Optional
The IMO Council also is encouraging the release of more documents by governments in advance of or during the Council sessions, but again with a caveat.
Member governments may keep their submissions secret from the public.
All documents submitted by member states, intergovernmental organizations and nongovernmental organization will be released to the public “unless indicated by the submitter at the time of submission,” according to the IMO statement.
In other words, disclosure is at the discretion of document authors.
The IMO also announced that documents submitted by the IMO Secretariat will be released prior to Council meetings “unless decided otherwise in advance by the Council.”
The IMO said summaries of Council decisions will be made public.
The Council’s decision on documents is patterned after a policy set in 2018 with regard to IMO committees, where most of the drafting and negotiating work occurs. (See Eye on Global Transparency article.)
The Council said that IMO members who submit documents in advance of IMO meetings, including committee meetings, could release them to the public. Also, it was decided that the IMO Secretariat would release documents it submits to committees in advance of meetings unless the body to whom they are sent decides to restrict access.
The policy appeared to increase the number of available documents, but some are still withheld. For example, in 2019, the Japanese government declined to its proposal for cutting ship emissions. (See EYE article.) Also in 2019, no documents are available in advance of a meeting of a working group on greenhouse gases produced by ships. Sources told EYE that 23 documents are visible to IMO members and accredited observers. However, none are visible to the public. (See EYE article.)
A survey by EYE in 2019 found that more documents are being disclosed in advance of committee meetings, but one quarter of the member governments still kept their pre-meeting submissions confidential for an upcoming meeting on environmental issues. (See EYE article.)
Australian Document Sheds Some Light on Council Decision
Only seven documents are displayed on the web page for the recently concluded July Council meeting.
One documents sheds a little light on the discussion about transparency, hinting that not all members wanted to shield voting from video feed.
That document is from the Australian representative and is dated June 14. It notes that the Council agreed, at its 127th session (in July of 2022), “that in principle, some meetings, or parts thereof, should be livestreamed to the public (C 127/D).”
It recounts further that Australia and others (unnamed) “proposed a model for livestreaming IMO meetings to the public based on the precedent set by the UN General Assembly.” Various exceptions are described, but the Australian proposal does not mention an exception for voting.
“Lessons learned from livestreaming” of the last Assembly meeting, the Australian submission says “show that there is ample interest and demand to support the livestreaming of other sessions of the organs of the Organization. The total number of views for the eight day Assembly meeting was 8,183 (an average of 1,023 views per session).
Australia also invited the Council to “agree to task the IMO Secretariat to include a review of IMO Committees’ Rules of Procedure to make IMO meetings public by default as part of the holistic review.”
Half a dozen documents referred by their IMO document numbers in the Australian submission could not be located by searching the IMO website.
Some IMO documents are available to the public online in IMODOCS, which requires registration, and is difficult to navigate. The public sees only a fraction of the documents available to members and to qualified “observers” who are bound by confidentiality rules.
IMO Adopted Access to Information Policy in 2021
The IMO in 2021 adopted a policy on access to information, although it included exceptions likely will prevent disclosure of documents about policies under consideration, internal investigations and IMO contracts. (See EYE article.)
Requests for information should be submitted, by letter (electronic submission will be accepted). Request letters may be sent by email to info@imo.org, or by post to 4 Albert Embankment, London SE1 7SR. Requests must include the following information:
Only 13 of the 27 UN organizations have freedom of information policies, according to a 2023 EYE survey. The IMO’s is the most recent FOI policy.
