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EU CRIMARIO aims to strengthen maritime safety and security in the wider Indian Ocean region by supporting coastal countries in enhancing maritime situational awareness (MSA).
€ 5.5m
BUDGET
01/01/2015
PROJECT START
48 months
DURATION
PROJECT FUNDED BY
Reducing maritime risk through information sharing
The Indian Ocean is the maritime route through which about 70% of the oil transported around the world transits. Despite its recent decline, piracy in the Indian Ocean must continue to be prevented, while other forms of organised crime at sea must also be tackled, such as human trafficking, drugs and arms trafficking, illegal fishing, oil pollution and the illegal exploitation of marine resources. Controlling these problems, which are developing around waters under national sovereignty and international waters, requires inter-administration coordination and regional cooperation.
To address these challenges, the European Union is supporting the regional mechanism of the Djibouti Code of Conduct, which was signed in 2009 by the 21 coastal countries of the Western Indian Ocean and amended in 2017 in Jeddha, and has launched the Critical Maritime Routes Programme.
Within this programme, the CRIMARIO project aims to strengthen maritime safety and security across the entire Indian Ocean by assisting the coastal countries with the development of maritime domain awareness.
To this end, CRIMARIO offers the regional partners several initiatives, which include the creation of a secure web portal for information sharing and incident management (IORIS), the creation of a regional AIS network, training for capacity building, workshops promoting inter-administration and regional cooperation, as well as assistance to design a set of information-sharing policies.
These initiatives will allow data from various sources to be shared and merged in order to enhance maritime domain awareness. In return, exhaustive and ongoing maritime domain awareness will give the coastal States the capacity to improve safety and security and protect the marine environment.
To ensure the sustainability of the achievements of CRIMARIO, a new project, called CRIMARIO II, will start in 2020 with an extension to South and Southeast Asia. It is also financed by the European Union (EU) and will be implemented by Expertise France.
IORIS, an information-sharing and incident management network
Version 1.0 of IORIS has been operational since 1 July 2018. This new secure tool for information sharing and the management of incidents at sea allows member countries to establish a collaborative working environment in order to enhance their maritime domain awareness and coordinate operations in the event of incidents at sea. IORIS is a secure Internet network:
• for information sharing,
• for collaboration and discussion,
• for the real-time management of national or regional incidents,
• for access to a resource library,
• entirely owned and managed by the regional partners.
Terrorism and its corollary, organised crime, are today the main cross-cutting threats to peace and security at both national and international levels. The international community’s priority is therefore to combat these threats via cooperation among countries and the exchange of technical know-how.
Consult 
