The Cabinet of Ministers reformed the system of seamen certification

The Cabinet of Ministers by a new resolution reformed the system of training and certification of seafarers in accordance with international requirements and practices.

The text of Cabinet Resolution No. 1499 of December 30, “Some Issues of Assigning Ranks to Command Staff of Sea Ships” has already been published . The document makes the following changes:

– digitalization of processes and leveling of the possibility of third-party access to the unified State register of seafarers’ documents. This should eliminate any corruption risks by minimizing the influence of the human factor;

– the State Qualification Commission (SQC) will also be responsible for accepting exams for seafarers. It will include specialists in the maritime industry, information about which will be published on the marad.gov.ua website;

– a seafarer can submit an application for obtaining qualification documents through the “Diya” portal;

– established an exhaustive list of grounds for refusing to issue documents to seafarers. At the same time, the possibility of not only a judicial appeal against the decisions of the DCC, but also an administrative appeal is provided, by sending a complaint to the relevant Appeals Commission.

– the seafarer will have the right to be present during the meeting of the Appeals Commission, which will review the contested decision of the DCC.

– the professional competence of seafarers will be checked using the globally recognized CES test instead of the compromised AST test that was used before;

– instead of the outdated titles of the captain of small/long-distance sailing, the term “small sailing” as such, and other terms that did not comply with the PDNV Convention, the concepts of long-distance and coastal sailing are introduced, as well as the names of the team in accordance with the requirements of the PDNV Convention.

The changes should remove an extra link that slowed down the process of training and certification of seafarers and caused many questions. The introduced changes bring the Ukrainian seafarer certification system closer to international standards.