Lucrative ship-scrapping trade sees poor Bangladeshi workers face ‘abhorrent conditions with abysmal environmental protections’.
New figures from the NGO Shipbreaking Platform showed that almost half the 532 ships broken on the beaches of south Asia in 2018 flew flags of just three tiny offshore tax havens – the Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean, Palau in the Pacific and the Caribbean islands of St Kitts and Nevis whose flag was found on 29 of those vessels.
Under European state-controlled port inspection regimes, all three flags are blacklisted due to their poor enforcement of international conventions.