A merchant ship sent away from its berth to clear the quay for a military movement, with no one to bill for the lost call: that, in miniature, is the deal the European Parliament's defence and transport committees have just struck on the EU's draft military mobility law. Their text keeps the European Commission's rule that civilian operators are owed nothing when the armed forces are given priority in an emergency, a no-payout default that a cross-group revolt tried and failed to strike out. It also lets national coordinators issue binding orders that civilians must carry out "without delay", with no legal challenge able to put the order on hold while it is heard. The committees agreed the position on 23 June; it goes to the full Parliament in Strasbourg from 6 to 9 July, and to the Council of Ministers after that.
At the centre of the scheme is a shared "solidarity pool", into which Member States would put civilian vessels for the armed forces to draw on. What the law does not say is what a ship becomes once it is in there. A merchant vessel listed for military use sits in a category that is neither plainly civilian nor plainly military, and the questions that follow are left open: liability, insurance, whose flag rules apply. Shipowners pushed for a line guaranteeing that a pooled vessel keeps its merchant status; the committees declined, leaving it to be settled ship by ship in contracts. The obligations are firm and immediate; the protections, a promise to negotiate later.
The carve-outs are adding up
Portugal and Greece have carved their island routes out of the FuelEU Maritime Regulation, the latest of several Member States, after France, Spain, Italy and Croatia, to claim island relief. The Greek order covers 31 lifeline routes from the mainland to the Aegean islands and Crete; Portugal's reaches Madeira, the Azores and, on its wording, the outermost regions of other Member States too. Each carve-out is justified as protecting island fares, and each is meant to lapse by 2029, but the list now reads less like a set of exceptions than like a second regime growing alongside the first. With pressure building in parallel for island relief under the emissions trading system and the Commission's ETS revision due in mid-July, the question is whether the relief stays contained to lifeline routes or becomes the template for unpicking the maritime green rules more widely.
The rebrand gambit
At the IMO, the fight over the Net-Zero Framework has taken on a linguistic nicety. The "fund" that would collect and redistribute emissions payments is the element Washington and its allies most object to, and one fix doing the rounds is simply to call it something else. The trouble is that the formal US submission to MEPC 84 ruled out any "financial penalty, carbon tax, levy, or multilateral fund, or equivalent thereof", language that looks written to shut precisely that door, while the UAE argues a fund cannot be created by amending MARPOL Annex VI at all. The matter returns to the resumed MEPC later this year.
Maritime Watch has covered the EU maritime regulatory beat since 2010, an archive now running to more than five thousand articles. There is much more in this week's coverage, including Brussels' bid to reach national ship registries through the same military law, the binding emergency orders civilian operators could face, the Commission standing by its decision not to probe the HHLA sale to MSC, and a German state halting livestock exports to conflict zones as Brussels declines an EU-wide ban. Full coverage is at maritimewatch.eu, and free trials are available on request to editor@maritimewatch.eu.