The HKC does not prevent the most dangerous and polluting form of shipbreaking: the dismantling of end-of-life vessels on tidal mudflats, as practiced in countries like Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This method, known as beaching, exposes workers to life-threatening risks and does not prevent hazardous materials - such as oil sludge and heavy metal laden paints - from contaminating fragile coastal ecosystems. By failing to prohibit beaching, the HKC rubberstamps a practice that has long been banned in all major ship owning countries [1] and which is excluded as an option for end-of-life management by responsible shipping companies [2]. 

The UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics and Human Rights and civil society groups globally already called out the HKC for its weak environmental standards and its silence on worker protection when the Convention was adopted in 2009. Since then, more than 100 beaching yards in India and Bangladesh have claimed that they operate in compliance with the HKC and received so-called Statements of Compliance with HKC from well-known classification societies. It says much about the low standard set by the IMO that facilities operating on a beach without infrastructure to contain pollutants, with no hospitals in the close vicinity, no capacity to safely dispose of hazardous materials and no track record of monitoring the health of their workers, supposedly fulfil the requirements of the HKC. Poor safety standards at these yards have caused numerous deaths and injuries - last year an explosion killed seven workers at a facility in Bangladesh that had obtained a so-called Statement of Compliance with HKC from Japanese classification society ClassNK.

The HKC’s reliance on defective flag-state control [3], its failure to impose binding labour and environmental protections, and its lack of downstream waste accountability means that ship owners can continue to operate with impunity, outsourcing the risks of dismantling to some of the world’s most vulnerable communities. 

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform strongly denounces industry pressure to position the HKC as a substitute for existing, more robust legal instruments—most notably the Basel Convention, which restricts the global trade of hazardous waste and bans the dumping of toxic waste on developing countries. [4] While legal experts have outlined why the Basel Convention cannot be replaced by the HKC [5], governments must now support ways to ensure better enforcement of existing international environmental and labour laws and amend the HKC to bring it in line with these laws. Any move to side-line the Basel Convention in favour of the current weaker HKC framework would be a serious setback for global environmental governance and a betrayal of the communities who have borne the cost of this industry's failures for decades.