Helping merchant seafarers

On 28 January 2000, the maritime administrations of France, United Kingdom, Spain, Singapore, the US Coast Guard and the European Commission signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the setting up of the Equasis information system. The maritime administration of Japan has expressed its intention to join the signatories, but has not yet finalised its internal procedures for doing so. Equasis will be a unique database collecting safety-related information on the world's merchant fleet from both public and private sources and making it easily accessible on the Internet. The launch of the database is planned for May 2000. The Internet address of Equasis will be www.equasis.org.