Seafarer Recruitment and Placement: MLC Compliance for Shipowners

The duty that follows the crew on board

A cruise line fills hotel, galley, technical and deck positions through recruitment and placement services. The seafarers arrive with a passport, a seafarer's book, medical and training certificates, and a signed agreement. The ship sails. Then a port state control officer, a flag administration auditor or a claimant's lawyer asks a narrower question: who recruited this crew, under whose law does that office operate, and what did you do to satisfy yourself it complied?

Under the Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 that question has a specific address. Standard A1.4, paragraph 9 requires each ratifying Member to make shipowners of ships flying its flag, who use seafarer recruitment and placement services based in countries or territories in which the Convention does not apply, "ensure, as far as practicable, that those services meet the requirements of this Standard". Regulation 1.4, paragraph 3 says the same thing from the Member's side. Paragraph 10 closes the gap that operators most often hope for: nothing in the Standard diminishes the obligations and responsibilities of shipowners.

The consequence is easy to state and expensive to discover late. The agency is not the only party on the hook. If the office that recruited the crew sits in a jurisdiction where the Convention does not apply, the shipowner has to be able to produce evidence of its own diligence. In practice that evidence takes the form of a file: a shipowner's audit, or a third-party audit the administration is willing to accept.

The office address decides the regime, not the flag

Operators tend to think about crewing compliance through the flag. The flag sets who supervises you. The question under Standard A1.4 is different: it turns on where the recruitment and placement service itself is established. Two offices supplying identical crew to the same ship can sit on opposite sides of this line.

Our two working jurisdictions fall on opposite sides, which is why we are asked this question often.

Montenegro ratified the Maritime Labour Convention on 3 February 2015 and the Convention is in force for it. A recruitment and placement service established in Montenegro therefore operates inside a ratified regime, under a national licensing system with a supervising ministry and a labour inspectorate behind it.

Türkiye has not ratified the Convention. It appears on the International Labour Organization's list of countries that have not ratified this Convention. The instrument approving ratification was published domestically in 2017, but publication of an approval and deposit of an instrument of ratification are different events, and only the second one puts a state on the ILO's list. The practical effect for an operator is direct: a recruitment and placement service established in Türkiye is a service in a territory where the Convention does not apply, so Standard A1.4(9) is engaged and the shipowner's own verification duty is live.

This is not a reason to avoid Turkish crewing offices. Well-run Turkish services exist and Turkish seafarers serve across the cruise and merchant fleets. It is a reason to document the chain deliberately rather than assume the agency's paperwork carries you.

Montenegro rewrote its rules — the new law applies from 2026

Anyone relying on older guidance about Montenegro should stop. The Law on Maritime Navigation Safety that governed this area since 2013 has been replaced. A new Zakon o sigurnosti pomorske plovidbe was adopted on 27 December 2025 and published in Službeni list Crne Gore no. 160/2025 of 30 December 2025; under its Article 306 it entered into force on the eighth day after publication. Article 305 repealed the 2013 law apart from a small group of retained provisions.

The recruitment and placement regime now sits in Articles 183 to 186, and it is tied directly to the Convention rather than gesturing at it:

Intermediation may be carried out by the Employment Agency of Montenegro and by legal persons that satisfy the conditions set by the law and by MLC 2006, with the approval of the ministry. Supervision is expressly performed by checking the service's conformity with MLC 2006. Where irregularities are found, the ministry orders rectification within a period that may not exceed 90 days; if the service fails to rectify, the approval is withdrawn, and a fresh application cannot be filed for two years. The approval itself runs for a maximum of five years and is renewable on the same conditions.

Two obligations in the new text matter particularly to shipowners. First, the service may not charge seafarers fees, commissions or any other recruitment-related cost, and it must maintain a complaints and protection system, anti-fraud mechanisms, insurance or another financial guarantee covering repatriation and unpaid wages, and records accessible to the authority. Second, Article 186 places a duty on the operator: a shipowner or company of a Montenegrin-flag ship or yacht that uses a service to engage seafarers who are not Montenegrin nationals must require that service to apply the standards of the law and of the Convention. That is Standard A1.4(9) written into domestic law, and it is enforceable against the operator.

One transitional point governs the next stage. Article 299 gives the ministry 18 months to issue the implementing rulebooks, and until they are made the old secondary legislation continues to apply so far as it is not contrary to the new law. Conditions that will bind approved services are therefore still being written, and a service approved under the previous framework should be reviewing its file now rather than when the rulebook lands.

What an A1.4 file actually has to contain

Standard A1.4(5)(c) sets out what a compliant service does, and it is the natural spine of a shipowner's diligence file. A service must keep an up-to-date register of the seafarers it recruits or places, available to the competent authority. It must make sure seafarers are informed of their rights and duties under their employment agreements before or during engagement, with a real opportunity to examine the agreement before and after signing and to receive a copy. It must verify that the seafarers it places are qualified and hold the documents the job requires, and that their employment agreements comply with applicable law and any collective agreement forming part of them. It must make sure, as far as practicable, that the shipowner has the means to protect seafarers from being stranded in a foreign port. It must examine and respond to complaints and report unresolved ones. And it must operate a system of protection — insurance or an equivalent measure — compensating seafarers for monetary loss caused by the failure of the service or the shipowner to meet obligations under the agreement.

The fee rule deserves separate attention because it is where audits most often fail. Standard A1.4(5)(b) prohibits fees or charges for recruitment or placement being borne by the seafarer, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part. The exceptions are narrow: the cost of obtaining a national statutory medical certificate, the national seafarer's book, and a passport or similar travel document. Visa costs are expressly excluded from the exception and fall on the shipowner. A recruitment chain that pushes visa costs down to the crew is not compliant, and an operator who never asked is not protected by not having asked.

Seafarers' identity documents are not one document

"Seaman's book" is used loosely and it hides a distinction that matters when you verify a candidate file. The Seafarers' Identity Documents Convention (Revised), 2003 (No. 185) creates a specific identity document issued by a ratifying state. A national seafarer's book or service record book is a different instrument, issued under national law, and it exists in states that are not party to Convention No. 185 at all.

The split runs the same way as the MLC line. Montenegro ratified Convention No. 185 on 27 April 2017. Türkiye is not a party. A candidate file containing a Turkish seafarer's book is therefore perfectly normal and proves service and national documentation — but it is not a Convention No. 185 identity document, and a checklist that treats the two as interchangeable will either reject good candidates or record a compliance status the file does not support.

How we help

We act for the operator side and for the services themselves, and the work divides cleanly.

For shipowners, cruise operators and managers we build the Standard A1.4 diligence file: reviewing the recruitment chain, assessing the service against each limb of the Standard, examining the fee flow and the insurance or financial guarantee, and producing a written assessment an administration or a claimant can be shown. We draft and review seafarers' employment agreements and the contract chain that sits behind them, and we advise when a port state control finding, a detention or an individual claim puts the recruitment chain in issue.

For recruitment and placement services we advise on the approval and renewal route in Montenegro under Articles 183 to 185, on the complaints, anti-fraud, record-keeping and financial-guarantee systems the law now requires, and on aligning an existing operation with the new framework before the implementing rulebooks arrive.

We are a law firm. We do not operate as a seafarer recruitment and placement service, and we do not supply crew. Where an engagement needs one, the recruitment and placement function belongs with a service licensed for it, and our role is to assess and document that service rather than to be it.