Scandinavian Star civil case thrown out

Campaigners and survivors of the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster, in which 159 people died in 1990, have vowed to fight on after a Danish court threw out a civil claim that the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA) had breached their human rights by not carrying out port state control (PSC) checks of the vessel before it set sail. 

Had PSC checks been carried out, the ship would not have been allowed to sail on 6 April from Denmark to Norway due to many ship defects and inadequate crew training, campaigners have argued. It did sail, and a series of fires – suspected arson – spread out of control and turned the Bahamas-registered ship into a blazing inferno. 

But the court in Næstved, Denmark, noted in its judgement of 20 May that previous official investigations into the disaster had concluded that PSC checks would not have prevented the ship's departure and fires. It said it had no basis for judging whether a PSC intervention would have made a difference. 

The court ruled that the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) gave Denmark and other maritime nations which have ratified the convention, the right to carry out PSC, but no obligation. It noted that SOLAS was a complex set of rules designed to serve safety and commercial interests, and that the PSC practice by the DMA had previously been criticised but stated that it met the requirements of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to life). 

'There is no definite information that the DMA had specific knowledge about the Scandinavian Star and its crew, or that its calling at a Danish port in the period in question, including matters on board of a more serious nature presenting an immediate and specific risk for the plaintiffs’ or nearest next of kin’s life,' it ruled.  

However, minutes of a meeting between DMA senior management and the parliamentary scrutiny committee on 20 July 1990 stated the DMA did know Scandinavian Star was due to enter service but had no indication it was to be inspected right away. Danish shipping and local media had previously reported the pending arrival. 

The DMA referred to a parliamentary answer by the then-business minister Brian Mikkelsen in May 2017 about who at the DMA knew what about the ship before it entered service between Denmark and Norway. It had asked all current and former employees from the time and received no replies stating that they had known anything. Subsequent answers said that the Frederikshavn office was aware of the vessel's entry and had planned to do PSC check, but had not. 

Retired 3F union leader Henrik Berlau – in his fourth decade of campaigning against the DMA – said two legal investigations commissioned by the Danish government and parliament in 2022 and 2024, established the DMA did in fact know about Scandinavian Star and should have done a PSC check before the first departure from Frederikshavn with passengers. He said the government's legal adviser persuaded the court: 'Maybe the court did not care about legal investigations and task forces that did not have a judge at the end of the table,' he said. 

The lawyer for the 47 plaintiffs in the case, Mads Pramming, said the case will be appealed to the high court.  

Jan Halvor Harsem of the Norwegian survivors’ support group said the judgement was flawed in several regards. The 2022 Danish legal investigation stated the DMA did not organise PSC in a way that ensured control of flag of convenience (FoC) ships and said it 'should have organised PSC before the ship sailed initially with passengers in Denmark'.