. Flag state responsibilities Increased self-regulation should be its own reward for the shipping industry. But its main attraction for administrations stems from the perhaps belated realisation that effective control of maritime operations today is impossible without industry co-operation. Port state control may be the industry's police force but the role of the police is to catch criminals, not to stop innocent passers-by. If port state control has become a growth industry, it is principally because the historical supervisory role of the flag state as invigilator of the performance of its fleet can no longer be entirely relied upon. Yet while port state control has continued to attract the publicity, and lists of detained ships threaten to overwhelm the maritime press, the real finger of scrutiny this past year has quite properly been pointed at the flag state. After several years of potentially productive IMO discussion on the development of a self-assessment scheme for flag states, the debate ran into a political storm when the purpose of the exercise came to be addressed. Should the results of the self-assessment be returned to IMO, as the traditional maritime nations believed, with the implication that they would be subjected to some sort of third party analysis? Or should self-assessment, as most of the new maritime nations argued, simply be a self-help mechanism, to encourage a greater awareness of possible shortcomings? Sovereignty is a sensitive issue, and it was hardly reasonable to expect that the open registers and others would willingly subject themselves to the implied criticisms of the old guard. In the event states will simply be encouraged to use the self-assessment process in support of any applications to IMO for technical assistance. Unfortunately the politics have rather obscured the underlying issue, which is that the performance of flag states in the exercise of their responsibility for their ships varies considerably, and that some registers clearly leave loopholes through which the determinedly sub-standard operator can slip time after time. In an effort to help address this issue ICS has undertaken to try once more to develop some pointers to what the shipowner should look for in determining acceptable performance on the part of a flag state. The task is not easy, but the industry owes it to itself, as much as to the public at large, to promote high standards of operation, and if some flag states have evident shortcomings they deserve to be isolated by the shipping industry as much as by other states. .