On the 16 October 2018, the designated contact persons for MaKCs and RuleCheck from Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Turkey participated in one day training, delivered in EMSA’s premises in Lisbon, on these tools.

The objective of the training was to familiarize the national administrators of the new community (Enlargement countries) with all the functionalities of the tools. The training dealt not only with administrative issues, such as how to create user id’s, but allowed the participants to hands-on practice the technical features in a train-the-trainer approach, to allow them to further coach the officers in their home administrations.

Officers from the administrations in the Enlargement countries will now be provided access to the two tools.
The Maritime Knowledge Centre (MaKCs) is a web based e-Learning platform, providing a cost-effective and efficient way of ensuring the distribution of up-to-date training material to a large number of users. The system, developed and hosted by EMSA, was originally developed in support of the Professional Development Scheme of the Paris MoU, however EMSA has extended the accessibility of the platform to users beyond the Paris MoU domain. The platform contains modules available for the PSCOs as well as a large number of modules already available or under development for the targeted groups of participants from EU Members States, Enlargement and ENP (neighbourhood) countries and other PSC regimes around the globe.

RuleCheck is a web based decision supporting tool originally designed for the competent PSC authorities in the Paris MoU domain, and is an up-to-date repository of maritime legislation. RuleCheck facilitates the work of the port state control officers (PSCOs) by filtering the applicable requirements of the international and regional instruments for a specific ship according to its type, construction date, size etc. or through the correlation of an identified deficiency code with applicable reference to an international convention. The search function gives PSCOs ready access to relevant and targeted information, avoiding the need to consult hard copies. The tool has been made accessible to PSCOs from beneficiary countries of the Enlargement and ENP projects for technical assistance implemented by EMSA (both from MED MoU and BSMoU, not party of any Memorandum on PSC) , to staffs from the beneficiaries’ maritime Administrations and to accident investigation authorities. Furthermore, the tool has been since 2018 provided to port state control officers from the Caribbean MoU and the Indian Ocean MoU in order to enhance the PSC harmonization procedures.