The auspicious submission of Nigeria’s instrument for the ratification and eventual domestication of the MLC 2006 was at the 102nd Session of the ILO International Labour Conference holding in Geneva, Switzerland.
The Conference, which started June 5, and has representatives of over 100 countries in attendance, will end tomorrow.
The MLC 2006 is a convention of the ILO.
It provides comprehensive rights and protection at work for the world’s more than 1.2 million seafarers. The Convention aims to achieve both decent work for seafarers and secure economic interests in fair competition for quality shipowners.
The new labour standard consolidates and updates more than 68 international labour standards related to the maritime sector adopted over the last 80 years.
The Convention sets out seafarers’ rights to decent conditions of work on a wide range of subjects, and aims to be globally applicable, easily understandable, readily updatable and uniformly enforced.
It has been designed to become a global instrument known as the “fourth pillar” of the international regulatory regime for quality shipping, complementing the key Conventions of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO).
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved the domestication of the MLC 2006 last month.
Briefing journalists after that FEC meeting chaired by Vice President Namadi Sambo, Minister of Information, Mr Labaran Maku, alongside his Labour and Transport counterparts, Chief Emeka Wogu and Senator Idris Umar, respectively, said that, for seven years, Nigeria had been unable to ratify and domesticate the agreement, despite the various advantages attached to doing so.
Maku said that the Council deliberated and further approved the joint memorandum submitted for the domestication by Wogu and Idris and forwarded it to the Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of the Federation, Mr. Muhammad Bello Adoke, to prepare the legal instrument.
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