TIGHTENING due diligence requirements for charterers and cargo owners may prove central to tackling the industry’s persistent, and still deeply troubling, record of seafarer abandonment.

That is the view of several organisations now at the forefront of efforts to bring the practice to an end.

Each year, the International Transport Workers’ Federation releases its tally of seafarer abandonment cases from the previous 12 months, and in recent years the numbers have surged. 

Crew were abandoned on 410 vessels last year, up from 312 in 2024 and 132 in 2023. Until 2024, the increases had been relatively modest; then the numbers exploded. While last year’s 31% rise looks small beside 2024’s 136% jump, it still amounts to roughly 100 additional cases.

This is all part of what ITF legal director Ruwan Subasinghe called the organisation’s naming and shaming effort. While valuable in principle, the effort to press flag and port states most frequently cited in the data has yet to shift the numbers. 

Instead, Subasinghe explained that the ITF is moving further up the supply chain.

He said his organisation was engaging with multinational corporations, the customers of shipping, to “put a spotlight on this kind of abuse”.

There is growing momentum within household retailers to “more than just talk the talk, but actually try and do something around the respective human rights of workers across their supply chains,” Subasinghe said.

Yet transport workers themselves are often overlooked. A fashion retailer, for instance, is far more likely to scrutinise the origins of its cotton or factory conditions than the treatment of the crews moving its goods.

Subasinghe stressed, however, that seafarer abandonment is a violation of international law (through the Maritime Labour Convention).

He said he had even argued, in some cases, that hiring seafarers when a shipowner intends to abandon a vessel (for example, when they can no longer service the mortgage) amounts to human trafficking, “which brings with it forced‑labour and modern‑slavery legislation”.

Those are phrases the aforementioned multinationals would distance their association from on a reputational perspective. But crucially there could be legal risk too when human rights due diligence legislation is phased in by EU member states over the next three years.

Retailer ASOS and the ITF have already signed a legally binding agreement, in which the federation will co-operate with the fashion giant on conducting due diligence in its transport operations and logistics chain.

“This is now becoming more than a nice thing to do”, Subasinghe told Lloyd’s List.

The ITF’s aim, he explained, was to get these big companies to only use shipowners that have collective agreements in place for their crews.

“Abandonment can take place on board a ship with a collective agreement, but at least it gives them some form of assurance,” he said.

It’s not easy to do the necessary due diligence for all companies in the shipping ecosystem though.

A huge customer like Rio Tinto, for example, is capable of conducting the kind of checks needed before selecting shipowners to work with and does so. Its designated owners and operators programme goes beyond its existing vetting, driving standards in safety and crew welfare.

Chief executive officer of the Sustainable Shipping Initiative (of which Rio Tinto is a member), Ellie Besley-Gould, said interviews with charterers and the wider shipping industry suggested there was a “huge gap in information sharing and availability” which meant that “only the very best in show” are able to think about things like abandonment when conducting their due diligence.

A smaller business without a dedicated safety, welfare or vetting team will struggle to access reliable data, Besley-Gould suggested.

Abandonment data is available through the International Labour Organization, but as InterManager secretary-general Kuba Szymanski pointed out, many vessels involved in abandonment cases own a sole vessel, making it “extremely difficult” for those attempting to get to bottom of who owns what.

Besley-Gould theorised a platform where charterers and cargo owners could view shipowners scored on a set of pre-agreed criteria. Abandonment could be one such metric, she said.

RightShip already operates a comparable system, scoring vessels on factors such as port state control performance, casualty history and fleet‑wide safety. The platform also measures vessels’ environmental and compliance risk.

Taner Umac, RightShip head of marine excellence, confirmed that any vessel involved in the abandonment of seafarers cannot score more than one out of five, the lowest rating.

But it does not stop there. Companies that RightShip identifies as affiliated with a vessel can also see their scores impacted too, addressing the issue Szymanski raised earlier.

In effect, a single abandonment case can taint an entire corporate network, even when vessels B, C and D sit under ostensibly separate ownership from the company that left crew stranded on vessel A. And even when an owner contacts RightShip to amend that low score, Umac said that simply resolving the abandonment case is not always enough to lift it.

“We want to know more. Why did this happen? How do you ensure this isn’t going to happen again?”

A poor RightShip score, Umac said, can be hugely impactful for a vessel’s chances of being chartered once more. He said users “take the red flags raised by us very seriously” and will often “immediately eliminate those vessels and operators” from the list of those they would consider working with in the future.

Besley-Gould split the industry into three tranches: the “best in show”, the outright “bad actors”, and the sizeable “big middle”.

That “big middle”, she said, can itself be split between those that want to improve and those that do not, with the latter edging closer to the bottom tier where abandonment is more likely.

Better data sharing would be a “mega easy win” for that “aspirational and willing” middle section, she said.

“You’ve got to understand that businesses are trying to operate with small margins and unless there is a commercially relevant reason, then we won’t drive change.”

That maxim applies across the supply chain. For shipowners, a system such as RightShip, or Besley‑Gould’s proposed platform, would introduce both incentives and consequences for the mistreatment of crew. For charterers and cargo owners, the real shift comes from reframing abandonment itself.

Highlighting the human rights risks tied to abandonment, and, in some cases, its potential classification as modern slavery, is the most effective way to get companies’ attention, Subasinghe stressed.

That’s when the message starts to land and companies recognise the reputational and legal risks involved, he explained. “You can say: ‘Look, you really do not want to expose yourselves to this’.”