About

Maritime Watch has been published since 2010. Sixteen years on, it remains what it set out to be: a Brussels-sourced account of the European Union's maritime regulatory machinery, written for the professionals whose work depends on knowing what that machinery is doing.

The publication covers the European Commission, the Council, the European Parliament and the IMO — the four institutions that between them shape the operating environment for shipowners, operators, ports, classification societies, P&I clubs and the vessels themselves. Fifteen years of coverage now sits in the archive: more than five thousand articles documenting how each institution has moved on every dossier of consequence to the industry.

The beat is everything that touches EU shipping policy: emissions trading, FuelEU Maritime, the MRV regulation, the maritime extension of the ETS, the Net-Zero Framework negotiations at IMO, sanctions architecture and shadow fleet enforcement, port state control, the social and labour dossiers, member-state flag policy, and the regular flow of regulatory amendments and delegated acts that keep a shipowner's compliance team employed. Some of these stories the trade dailies cover; many they do not, or they cover them briefly when a vote happens and not in the months either side, where the actual work is done. Maritime Watch covers the work.

Coverage is sourced from the institutions directly. The Commission's midday briefings, the Council register, European Parliament committee agendas and written questions, the IMO's working papers — these are the day-to-day inputs, supplemented by industry contacts cultivated over the fifteen years Maritime Watch has been on the beat. Where a story rests on a document, the document is attached to the article. Where a finding rests on background conversations, the article makes that distinction clear. Subscribers expect this and the editorial standard reflects it.

Maritime Watch's readers are professionals — shipping company executives, regulatory affairs teams, lawyers, lobbyists, consultants, government officials, classification societies, and the relevant policy desks at the major EU member states. The publication is read at the level of the operating decision: when a compliance team is sizing up a forthcoming delegated act, when a P&I club is briefing members on a new sanctions regime, when a shipowner's general counsel is preparing for an enforcement action. The editorial standards have been shaped accordingly.

The site you're reading is the relaunched version, moved in May 2026 to a new platform. The full archive runs to more than five thousand articles. Around a thousand of these — coverage from 2021 onwards — are available on the site itself as a fully searchable archive, tagged by topic, institution, geography and actor, with free-text search across the corpus. Earlier coverage, back to 2010, is held in the editorial archive and available on request to subscribers researching specific dossiers, regulatory histories or named actors.

Maritime Watch publishes a free weekly newsletter, the Maritime Watch Monitor, which signals the week's regulatory developments without summarising the underlying coverage. The Monitor is also published to the site as a public digest each Tuesday.

To receive the Monitor by email, sign up free using the Subscribe button at the top of any page, or click here to subscribe.

For full access to the site, trials are available on request. Email editor@maritimewatch.eu to set up a free two-week trial.

Justin Stares
Editor
Brussels
May 2026