One of the main responsibilities of border regulatory agencies involved in cross-border trade transactions, and Customs in particular, is to expedite the supply of goods while ensuring compliance and safety. Among the tools that are mainly used to reconcile the functions of controlling the international movement of goods with the needs of trade facilitation, there are the risk profiling, scoring and management techniques: all activities that such agencies today usually conduct with the support of specific IT and data analysis systems. The reality, however, is that both Customs and the other regulatory agencies use data analysis almost exclusively for conducting risk management and risk scoring activities, while such techniques could be used also for facilitating trade, as explained in this article that we published a few years ago in the World Customs Journal. Another problem of risk analysis systems, especially in economies in transition, is that they are often not integrated with each other. Accordingly, risk analysis is normally conducted separately by each agency, without cooperative relationships among them, as joint risk analysis are quite rare.

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The International Chamber of Shipping, with a press release issued on 22 August, announced that a request has been submitted to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) together with other representatives of the worldwide shipping industry, to remove the section of the Indian Ocean waters including the Gulf of Aden in Somalia, as well as the Djibouti, Eritrea and a part of the Kenyan coast from the list of the piracy-high risk areas, due to a significant reduction of pirates attacks in the latest years. The request will be discussed on 31 October 2022 to the next meeting of the IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee, the body dealing with all issues related to maritime safety and maritime security of passenger and cargo ships, with the removal to be effective from 1 January 2023.

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