International Maritime Law and Ocean Policy

The ocean is under threat from human activities, arising in part from the lack of proper governance of the waters within and beyond the limits of national jurisdiction. There is an urgent need to examine and reconsider the current regime to seek a secure, stable, safe and sustainable ocean governance for the 21st century.The innovative MPhil programme has been designed in partnership by IMO’s two sister institutions, WMU and the IMO International Maritime Law Institute (IMLI) in Malta, to play a part in ensuring the future sustainability of the world’s oceans in accordance with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The two-year programme is designed to train expert maritime lawyers, immersed in the UN system structure and goals, who can advocate for the policies and legislation to transform the world’s oceans and support their sustainable development. The programme had its first intake in 2017.Students spend the first academic year in Malta to follow IMLI’s well-established LL.M. programme in International Maritime Law. The full programme details can be found on the IMLI website (www.imli.org).Students then have a non-teaching period from May to September to gather dissertation material. The dissertation is a project supervised jointly by WMU and IMLI reflecting the needs of students’ home countries or regions for adequate ocean governance. In September the students move to WMU in Sweden until October the following year, to pursue studies with particular focus on Ocean Sustainability, Governance and Management and to complete their dissertation.