According to KKE, shipowners are pressuring crews to sign supposedly voluntary ‘declarations of acceptance of risk’ before vessels enter areas affected by armed conflict, thereby shifting responsibility onto seafarers in the event of injury or death.
In their question to the Commission, KKE MEPs Kostas Papadakis and Lefteris Nikolaou-Alavanos cite serious complaints from seafarers’ unions about the pressure being placed on crews assigned to voyages through conflict zones.
They state that seafarers are often asked, just one to three days before a vessel enters such areas, to sign declarations confirming that they have been informed about the voyage, understand the risks involved and agree to pass through particularly dangerous sea lanes. In practice, KKE says, these declarations are used by shipping companies to transfer responsibility to seafarers themselves in the event of injury or death.
The party argues that while the ongoing imperialist attack by the US and Israel against the people of Iran has become a field of enormous profitability for shipping groups, because of soaring freight rates and insurance costs, it poses a grave threat to the lives and safety of seafarers and cadets at Greece’s merchant marine academies.
KKE says shipowners, profiting from exceptionally high freight rates, are sending ships into the Persian Gulf while blackmailing seafarers into risking their lives for shipping profits, thus showing in the starkest terms that they benefit directly from war.
The party also warns that the military escort initiative announced by French President Emmanuel Macron, following a trilateral meeting with Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides, regarding the passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz under naval escort, places seafarers’ lives and safety in immediate danger.
According to KKE, the fact that shipowners have reached the point of cynically assigning a price to human life is the result of EU and government policies that protect their interests, as well as the EU’s ‘Shields’ operation in the Red Sea, coordinated by Greece and based at the Larissa headquarters, and the New Democracy government’s support for US-EU-Israel plans with the consent of the other parties.
The party also argues that the EU, member state governments and the Greek state bear serious responsibility for failing to classify these areas as war zones, instead describing them merely as ‘dangerous’. This, it says, allows shipowners to evade any obligation to repatriate crews immediately and at their own expense, while continuing to send vessels into these areas.
KKE asks the European Commission to state its position on three issues: the demand to stop exposing seafarers to such dangers by declaring the Red Sea and the entire Persian Gulf war zones and requiring shipowners to assume full responsibility and costs for the immediate and safe repatriation of crews, while also ending the coercion of seafarers into signing ‘declarations of acceptance of risk’; the demand for the immediate termination of the EU’s ‘Shields’ operation and the withdrawal of all frigates and military forces from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf; and the demand to close US-NATO bases on European territory, which it describes as not only war bases but also targets for retaliation amid the ongoing escalation of military conflict in the Middle East.
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