Officers’ union Nautilus International says it has had a “positive response” from International Maritime Organisation (IMO) secretary-general Koji Sekimizu after it called for action to ensure that countries comply with guidelines on fair treatment of seafarers following the Sewol disaster.

Nautilus head Mark Dickinson had written to Sekimizu and the South Korean embassy to express his concern over the way Captain Lee Joon Seok and the ship’s crew were treated following the 15 April accident.

Dickinson is particularly troubled by comments made by Korean president Geun Hye Park, who said of the crew’s conduct at the time of the accident: “It was like an act of murder that cannot and should not be tolerated.”

The crew had been criticised for their emergency response to the listing of the ferry.

Dickinson suggests that past experience has shown a final investigation is likely to reveal that the high loss of life — now estimated at over 300, many of them school children — is due to a number of factors rather than a single decision by the ship’s crew.

He said: “Many accident investigations provide us all with copious evidence that incidents are rarely the result of deliberate, malicious actions but rather the result of complex chains of multiple factors in which many parties share responsibility.”

It is not the first time Korea has come under attack for its handling of seafarers involved in a marine casualty.

The detention of two officers from the 270,000-dwt oil tanker Hebei Spirit (built 1993) following an oil pollution incident — the result of a collision — was widely condemned and one of the main reasons for the updating of guidelines on the fair treatment of seafarers.

In 2007, the tanker spilled 10,000 tonnes of crude at the Taean terminal, leading to the 550-day detention of master Jasprit Chawla and officer Syam Chetan, even though it was clear the fault lay with a barge crane controlled by Korea’s Samsung Group.

John Dickie of the International Federation of Ship Masters Associations fears that the Sewol master will not get a fair trial.

Writing in the Telegraph magazine in the UK, he said: “Seafarers should at least be given a fair hearing and then a trial under the rule of law. It is difficult to see how this can happen in the Sewol case.

“What chance does the master of the Sewol have of a fair trial when he has already been branded a murderer in all but name by the South Korean president, and the media has already passed sentence on him?”