Methodology

What this site is

A free, per-vessel index of official sanctions listings. The canonical data path is the government lists themselves, parsed directly. Nothing on a vessel page is written freely: every fact row carries the authority, the date, the program and a link to the primary document, and the "Is this vessel sanctioned?" paragraph is generated from a fixed template over those rows.

Sources

Matching rules

• IMO is the only join key. Two records are the same vessel only if they carry the same valid IMO number (check digit verified). Two IMOs are never merged.
• Records without an IMO (a handful of OFAC entries, mostly small craft and older listings) are held as candidates. A candidate is shown on a vessel page only when name and at least one of flag, tonnage or build year agree (confidence ≥ 0.9), and always labelled "not merged".
• Companies are matched by normalised name plus jurisdiction; legal-form suffixes (Ltd, FZCO, OOO…) are ignored for matching but preserved for display.

Dates

• OFAC: designation date from the advanced SDN XML entry event, corroborated with the Recent Actions notice of that day and its press release.
• UK: DateDesignated from the UK Sanctions List.
• EU: "Date of application" in Annex XLII of Regulation 833/2014 (consolidated text on EUR-Lex). Package labels are attached only for dates whose amending regulation we have verified. The DPRK vessels in Annex XIV of Regulation 2017/1509 carry the UN Committee's date of designation and no EU date of application, so their EU listing date is shown as not stated rather than borrowed from the UN.
• Australia: the Consolidated List states no listing date. Its "Control Date" is defined by DFAT as the last date an entry was updated or edited, so it is not used as a listing date: Australian listings are shown as having no stated date, and the update date is quoted in the entry. Before 20 September 2026 this site treated it as the listing date, which showed all 58 of the UN's DPRK vessels as listed by Australia on 28 August 2026, the day their entries were edited.
• Delistings: from the authority's removal notice where one exists; otherwise inferred from the day the vessel left the list, and marked "date inferred".

Known gaps

• The EU consolidated financial sanctions file (asset-freeze targets) is not read. It contains no vessels: it has no record type for a ship, and the IMO numbers in it are company numbers belonging to shipping firms rather than hull numbers. We read it for company records until 2 October 2026, when its public download began redirecting to an EU Login sign-in page, and those records were then withdrawn. Every EU vessel listing here comes from Annex XLII of Regulation 833/2014, which is a port and services ban rather than an asset freeze, or from Annex XIV of Regulation 2017/1509.
• The UN Security Council's 1718 Committee designations are included, read from the Committee's own PDF list. They cover 58 hulls, every one of which is also listed by at least one national authority here — the UN entry adds the designation that binds all member states, and the measures the Committee applied.
• Authorities are covered by the instruments named on sources, not by their entire sanctions programme. EU coverage is Regulation 833/2014 Annex XLII (Russia), Annex XIV of Regulation 2017/1509 (the DPRK vessels the UN designated, in two parts: seizure and entry ban), so EU asset freezes and EU vessel measures under any other regime are not held here. New Zealand is the Russia Sanctions Register only. A vessel shown as unlisted by one of those authorities may still be designated by it elsewhere.
• Japan's designations are not ingested. The Ministry of Finance publishes them as per-regime PDFs in Japanese, with no consolidated machine-readable list and no vessel-specific structure, so we leave them out rather than risk wrong data.
• OFAC listing dates older than the Recent Actions backfill window are taken from the SDN file only (no press-release link yet).
• No behaviour signals (AIS gaps, encounters) and no incidents yet.

Refresh

Nightly at 03:00 UTC. Raw files are stored with checksums so any past day's source can be reproduced. Data last refreshed: 21 Oct 2026, 10:25 UTC.

How this site is made

Record pages are generated by code. Vessel, company, flag, programme and daily-change pages, and the "Is this vessel sanctioned?" summary on each vessel page, are produced from the parsed official lists. Their sentences are fixed templates filled with listing data; neither a person nor an AI model writes them, and no listing is added by hand.

Editorial pages are drafted with AI assistance. The explainers under Learn, the glossary, the notes, the FAQ, the registry notes on flag pages and the incident entries are drafted with an AI model (Anthropic's Claude), under the direction of the site's operator, and checked against the sources they cite. Each incident entry is curated individually from one dated source. No lawyer or maritime-intelligence analyst has reviewed these pages and none is claimed to have.

What the AI does not do. It does not decide which vessels or companies are listed (only the official lists do), does not infer ownership or wrongdoing, and makes no image: share cards and charts are drawn by code. Pages carry no invented author; the site is published under its own name.

Pages with little to say. A company named against a single vessel, a flag with fewer than three listed vessels, a programme with fewer than three, and a day with fewer than three changes stay available and linked, but are kept out of search-engine indexes and out of the sitemap, so search engines are pointed at pages that say more.

Errors still occur. If one is found, the corrections page is how to report it.

Corrections

See Corrections & removal requests. Target response: five business days; corrections are logged publicly.