FROM
HKC ns/i
DATE
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12
Mr David Blogg
Consular Department
ст
CC
: C A Whomersley Legal Advisers
: 13 January 1991
: Mr Young, Legal Advs
Miss Barratt, Legal Advs Mr Williams, AMD
IS
s
RECOVERY OF SEAMAN DESERTERS
1. I was gratified to see that, at last, the amendments to Article 29 of the UK/Italy Consular Convention have entered into force; this was one of the first issues that I dealt with when I first joined the Office some 14 years ago, and I am pleased to see that at last it has yielded a positive result.
2.
More pertinently, I notice that the Exchange of Notes with the Italians also terminates Article 28 of the Consular Convention, which dealt with mutual assistance in the recovery of merchant seaman deserters. We seem, therefore, to have reached the position that all of the treaty provisions for the recovery of seaman deserters have been terminated apart from those with Portugal, Yugoslavia and Nicaragua. I attach some earlier minutes on this subject, from which you will see that I have taken the view in the past that once the provision in the UK/Italy Consular Convention had been terminated, then we would be able to implement the provisions in the three agreements with Portugal, Yugoslavia and Nicaragua simply through reliance upon the powers in the Immigration Act; in other words we could then repeal the provisions in the Merchant Shipping Acts which set out a particular procedure for dealing with merchant seaman deserters.
3. As regards the UK legislation, the Merchant Shipping Act 1894, Section 238, originally applied in the UK and all colonies. In 1970, it was replaced in the United Kingdom by section 89 of
/the Merchant...
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