Seafarers: minimum level of training

PURPOSE : to present a proposal for a European Parliament and Council Directive on the minimum level of training of seafarers (consolidated text). CONTENT : in the context of a people's Europe, the Commission attaches great importance to simplifying and clarifying Community law so as to make it clearer and more accessible to the ordinary citizen, thus giving him new opportunities and the chance to make use of the specific rights it gives him. This aim cannot be achieved so long as numerous provisions which have been amended several times, often quite substantially, remain scattered, so that they must be sought partly in the original instrument and partly in later amending ones. A consolidation of rules that have frequently been amended is also essential if Community law is to be clear and transparent. On 1 April 1987, the Commission therefore decided to instruct its staff that all legislative measures should be consolidated after no more than 10 amendments. The Conclusions of the Presidency of the Edinburgh European Council (December 1992) confirmed this, stressing the importance of legislative consolidation as it offers certainty as to the law applicable to a given matter at a given time. Parliament and Council agreed, by an interinstitutional agreement, that an accelerated procedure may be used for the fast-track adoption of codification instruments. The purpose of this proposal for legislative consolidation of 94/58/EC on the minimum level of training of seafarers, is to undertake official codification of this type. The new Directive will supercede the various directives incorporated in it, their content is fully preserved, and they are brought together with only such formal amendments as are required by the codification exercise itself. Lastly, this legislative consolidation proposal was drawn up on the basis of a preliminary consolidation, in all the official languages, of Directive 94/58/EC, and the instrument amending it, carried out by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, by means of the data-processing system referred to in the conclusions of the European Council meeting in Edinburgh. Although the articles have been given new numbers, the old numbering has been retained in the margin for ease of reference; the correlation between the old and new numbers is shown in a table set out in Annex IV to the consolidated Directive. �