Maritime safety and pollution prevention: lessons learned from marine casualties, recommendations and regulatory process.

The paper deals with the fundamental role of investigating bodies collaborating with the regulatory and decision-making authorities (under International and European law) in the normative process of definition of new safety standard. It is specially underlined the paramount importance of correctness and completeness of the information collection, both in the phase of investigation and in the process of analysis and evaluation of results. From this point of view, investigation processes on marine casualties could be considered as a part of a wider function of risk analysis on maritime navigation.