By Dr. Katerina Konsta, Founder, World Maritime Academy
www.e-wma.com, support@e-wma.com
Where I come from, on the island of Chios, shipping is not an industry you enter. You are born into it. My father was a Captain, so was my uncle, my grandfather was a Chief Engineer and the story goes on. Our family table was a floating bridge-wing of its own, where voyages were replayed, charterers were judged, and port authorities were discussed in tones usually reserved for the sea itself.
What that table taught me above all else is that a seafarer’s life rests on trust. The owner trusts the master. The master trusts the crew. The family ashore trusts that the person who left will come home. In my family, that trust was never naive. But it was built on an assumption we rarely said aloud: that if a seafarer did their job honestly and professionally, the system would stand behind them.
It is that assumption which worries me today.
A pattern, not an exception
Too many seafarers still face detention and lengthy legal proceedings even when they acted in good faith while carrying out their professional duties.
Seafarers are held responsible after casualties and pollution incidents. And they are caught up in drug smuggling carried out aboard ships without their knowledge. In both cases, the person on the gangway, in the engine room or on the bridge becomes the most convenient defendant.
The IMO and the ILO have worked together on guidelines for the treatment of seafarers detained in connection with alleged crimes, adopted by the IMO Legal Committee. They exist to make sure rights are respected and detention is not prolonged unnecessarily. That is welcome progress but guidelines alone are not the end of the work.
The IMO’s Secretary-General, Arsenio Dominguez, has warned of a disturbing rise in seafarer criminalization. A pattern, not an exceptionation, driven by geopolitical tensions and a surge in substandard shipping linked to the so-called dark fleet. Analysts track between 1,300 and 1,400 vessels in that shadow fleet, about half of them crude oil tankers. Honest crews serving on those ships carry risks they cannot see and did not choose.
What the numbers say about masters
The industry is only beginning to measure the problem. Ship Managers’ Association InterManager has started collating cases and had identified 118 by its first count, while suspecting there are many more. In its limited data, the Master was the person imprisoned in 63% of cases. Cases peaked at 23 in 2023, with a further 17 in 2024, and tanker crews were the most frequently affected at 29%.
These figures are an incomplete floor, not a ceiling but they confirm what every Captain’s family already knows. The more authority a seafarer carries, the more exposed they are.
The case that should trouble us all
Captain Vitaly Tyutkalo, Master of the X-Press Pearl, has been barred from leaving Sri Lanka since the cargo fire and explosion that ultimately sank the vessel in May 2021. More than five years on, Seatrade reports, no criminal or civil proceedings have made any finding against him. In law, he remains not guilty of any crime.
Think about what five years means. A master’s career is measured in contracts and voyages. A captain’s family lives by the calendar of his return. Five years of limbo is not a procedural delay. It is a life suspended.
I have sat across from enough captains’ wives and children to know what this does to a household. I grew up in one. When my father was at sea, our home ran on a rhythm of waiting, and we accepted that as the price of the profession. Waiting for a ship to arrive is one thing. Waiting for a system to decide whether your husband or father is free to leave a foreign country is something no family should have to bear.
The pressure is growing
This is happening against a darker backdrop. In March, BIMCO launched a film calling for the protection of seafarers, noting that around 20,000 seafarers were stranded in the Persian Gulf, under heightened risk and considerable mental strain. It also voiced growing concern about rogue detention and sentencing of seafarers without sufficient evidence. Its message was simple: seafarers should never be detained or sentenced without sufficient evidence and due process.
In May, ICS and ITF told the IMO that seafarers continue to face arbitrary detention and prolonged imprisonment in foreign jurisdictions, often where evidence is insufficient to justify holding them during an investigation.
What this does to the profession
The industry is, rightly, anxious about recruitment and retention. We speak constantly about new fuels, digitalization, automation and cyber-security, and about preparing seafarers for all of them. The IMO’s ongoing review of the STCW Convention is part of that effort.
But the real question is what kind of profession we want to offer future generations. A young person in Manila, Piraeus or Odessa is not only weighing salary and rotation. They are weighing whether a single casualty, or a single contaminated container, could cost them years of their life in a foreign jurisdiction. If we want the best of that generation, we must be able to tell them honestly that this profession will protect them.
It is not enough to train excellent navigators and engineers. We must also train them to understand their rights, to document their actions, to know what to do when an investigation begins, and to know who to call. Maritime education has a duty here. Competence on the bridge must be matched by awareness ashore.
The rules exist. Applying them is the test.
The good news is that the framework is there. The IMO and ILO have produced guidelines on the fair treatment of seafarers detained in connection with alleged crimes, adopted by the IMO Legal Committee. The Nautical Institute, after a joint IMO, ILO, ICS and ITF event on the subject, was clear about the priority: the Fair Treatment Guidelines must be implemented, because seafarers’ rights are human rights.
Guidelines on paper protect no one. Implementation is the real test, and I see three priorities.
Three things we can do now
First, shipowners and managers should treat support for detained crew as a core duty of care, not a discretionary courtesy. Legal assistance, family contact and welfare support should be in place before a crisis, not improvised during one.
Second, flag and port states should apply the new IMO-ILO guidelines in practice, not only on paper. Prolonged detention without charge or findings should be the exception that requires justification.
Third, the industry should keep these stories visible. The X-Press Pearl case is known because a journalist chose to keep reporting it. Many others are never heard of at all.
The Captain/Seafarer and Shipowning chain
Captains and seafaring is also why Greek shipping is great. Its foundations were laid by Greek shipowners who were captains themselves, men who knew the sea, the crew and the responsibility of command before they ever owned a vessel. They understood the business from the bridge up. If you do not have Captains and seafarers, you do not have ships.
That is the reason the criminalisation of seafarers should concern every shipowner, manager and regulator. When we fail to protect the people, who command and crew our ships, we undermine the very thing the industry stands on.
The table, again
The truth the industry is hearing now is uncomfortable but clear. We cannot ask people to keep global trade moving and then abandon them when things go wrong.
Behind every case, as the IMO reminded us, there is a person and a family. Every seafarer’s family deserves the same recognition, and every seafarer deserves a system that treats them as the professional they are.
