Seafarer abandonment sparks radical policy push

Seafarer abandonment sparks radical policy push
February 25, 2026 https://splash247.com/seafarer-abandonment-sparks-radical-policy-push/

With abandonments up sharply, ITF and industry voices tell Splash Extra that verified ownership data, targeted blacklists and flag investigations are essential to stop repeat offenders.

With seafarer abandonment figures at all-time highs and rising for many years in a row, concrete proposals to stamp out the scourge have been sent to Splash Extra.

Seafarer abandonment hit record levels in 2025, according to new data compiled by the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), with 6,223 seafarers abandoned across 410 ships, the sixth year in a row that the number of vessels on which abandonments occurred has broken records. The numbers represent a 31% increase in such ship abandonments compared to 2024, and a 32% increase in seafarer abandonment.

The ITF has three ideas to tackle seafarer abandonment. First, flag states must be compelled to log a ship’s beneficial owner, including contact details, as a pre-condition for registration. Secondly, national blacklisting of ships should happen to protect seafarers from ships with repeated involvement in abandonment cases. Finally, the ITF is calling on governments to investigate the use of flags of convenience.

Kuba Szymanski, secretary general of InterManager, writing for Splash recently, noted that some systems dramatically reduce this risk.

“The Filipino model does one crucial thing: it creates clear responsibility. Government-certified agencies must follow the rules and are held accountable,” Szymanski wrote. As a result, Filipino crews appear far less frequently in abandonment cases than many other nationalities.

“Now compare that with countries where seafarers can ‘self-employ’ or sign on with anyone, anywhere. Ukrainians, Poles, Pakistanis, Indians, Sri Lankans and others often take the only offers available — especially if they are older, female, or considered less ‘employable’ by the mainstream market. That is exactly the demographic unscrupulous owners and shadow fleets target,” Szymanski added.

A spokesperson for the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said the forum to discuss abandonment, the legal committee, is due to meet in a couple of months with many submissions on the matter.

“IMO takes the matter of abandonment very seriously and remains extremely concerned about the increase in reported cases,” the spokesperson said.

Make ship operations more transparent and make non-compliance commercially painful

Helio Vicente, director of employment affairs at the International Chamber of Shipping (ICS), said a key priority to tackle the issue is in ensuring that the data is accurate, comprehensive and regularly updated. Vicente is leading a task force to review and enhance the UN’s abandonment database.

“Better data enables faster action, greater accountability and, ultimately, stronger protection for seafarers,” Vicente claimed.

Carl King, who heads up Seafarer Social, a platform to improve crew welfare and retention, argued that abandonment will only reduce when the industry stops treating it as a welfare issue alone and starts treating it as a tradability issue.

“The real solution is transparency and infrastructure: create a system where seafarers can report abuses safely, in real time, and where those reports directly affect a ship’s ability to trade,” King urged.

Chirag Bahri, international operations manager at the International Seafarers’ Welfare and Assistance Network (ISWAN), had a number of suggestions to battle abandonment, starting with knowledge and awareness among seafarers.

“The more informed seafarers are, the lower the likelihood of facing serious difficulties,” Bahri urged, saying it was essential to provide mandatory training for young trainees on the steps to take if their wages are delayed and to whom they should report such issues.

Secondly, Bahri called for owners to be arrested for seafarer neglect.

“Laws should be created not only to target those at the end of the chain but also to penalise those who breach them. Flag states must ensure that their national laws are enforced on the beneficial owners as well,” Bahri said.

Steven Jones, founder of the Seafarers Happiness Index, said that abandonment is sustained by information asymmetry and misaligned incentives.

Echoing ISWAN’s Bahri, Jones said: “The people who suffer are blind to risk, and that must change, by making welfare risks visible, financially consequential, and actionable.”

Jones said the industry must move from reactive humanitarian response to preventative governance, a system where information, accountability, and market access reinforce one another, making abandonment structurally difficult rather than punishable only after the fact.

Closing the gaps that abandonment exploits requires a framework where visibility, accountability, and agency work together, Jones explained. Universal identification that links seafarers to vessels creates the foundation of traceability, but it must sit alongside genuine transparency: verified beneficial‑ownership disclosure and open risk data that make hidden relationships visible.

Jones argued that every seafarer should have access to a vessel’s IMO number, port history, AIS pattern, detention record, and ownership trail, and the authority to act on that knowledge.

A global abandonment‑risk register, mapping each IMO number to verified ownership and continuous risk scores drawn from class, flag, wage‑complaint, and welfare data, would turn fragmented facts into foresight, he suggested, while also calling for a need to close the net around the recruiters who profit from deception, the agents who lend money to secure jobs that do not exist.

David Hammond, the founder of Human Rights at Sea, admitted that he does not see abandonment being stamped out due to the multi-jurisdictional complexity of the global shipping industry.

“The fact that the so-called flags of convenience have not been held to account for nearly 70 years, the existential rise in abandonment cases and commercial business tinkering on the edges of mandatory human rights due diligence says it all,” Hammond said.

Lawyer and shipping consultant David Galea has been working on an initiative to bring one abandonment solution eventually, something that is still in an early form. He conceded that there are no low-hanging fruit ways of cutting abandonment.

“The real issue with abandonment for me is not that it happens. But what happens once it does happen,” Galea told Splash Extra.

“It’s about how slow the industry is to react and provide concrete solutions to individuals – and their families – who are not only suffering the hardship of being onboard these vessels but not being able to provide for themselves and their loved ones. Why, as an industry, are we leaving unpaid crew on board a ship for months on end while institutions play an international game of hot potato?”

“Bad actors survive in opacity,” concluded King from Seafarer Social. “The only way to properly stamp out abandonment is to make ship operations more transparent and make non-compliance commercially painful.”