Paris MoU standings, explained
White, Grey and Black; the excess factor; the thirty-inspection floor. What the standings in our directory mean, where they come from, and why we show them verbatim.
Aurelith · · 4 min read
Every flag in the directory carries a badge: White · #22 of 69, Grey, Black, or Not rated. The badge is not ours. It is the Paris Memorandum of Understanding's, and this is what it means.
Who inspects, and what they count.
The Paris MoU is the agreement under which port authorities across Europe and the North Atlantic inspect foreign ships calling at their ports — port state control. Inspectors board a ship, check its certificates, its condition and its crew against the conventions the flag has signed, and when the deficiencies are serious enough, they detain it until they are put right. Every inspection and every detention is recorded against the ship's flag.
Once a year the Paris MoU publishes the result: a list of flags ranked by detention performance over a rolling three-year window. A flag needs at least thirty inspections in that window to be ranked at all. Below that, there is no standing — not a poor one, none — which is why the directory says Not rated and never anything harsher. It is a data threshold, not a judgement.
White, Grey and Black.
The ranked flags fall into three lists. White flags detain rarely enough to sit within the limit derived from a target detention rate of seven percent; Black flags sit beyond the upper limit; Grey flags sit between the two. Alongside the list, each flag has an excess factor— the published, normalised score behind the ranking, where a negative number is better than the target and a positive one worse — and a rank among every flag ranked that year. "White · #22 of 69" means the twenty-second best detention record of sixty-nine ranked flags, on the White list.
The lists matter beyond the badge. A ship under a Black-list flag is targeted for more frequent inspection in Paris MoU ports; a ship under a White-list flag, less. The flag an owner chooses follows the ship into every port it calls at.
Why we show it verbatim.
The standings in the directory are the Paris MoU's figures, stored as published and never recomputed — the list, the rank, the excess factor, the inspections and the detentions. The one figure we compute is the detention rate, which is detentions over inspections and says so where it appears. Each registry in the directory flies exactly one flag, so its standing is that flag's row, and every page that shows a standing names the edition and links the annual report it came from.
We could have built a score of our own. We did, once, and took it down: a rating a company invents is an opinion with a number on it, and a flag's record in the ports of Europe is a fact. The standings page shows every ranked flag in the directory on that record — and nothing else.
