The Helsinki Commission, or HELCOM, is the governing body of the 'Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area' - more commonly known as the Helsinki Convention. It works to protect the marine environment of the Baltic Sea from all sources of pollution through intergovernmental co-operation between the Baltic Countries. The ratification instruments where deposited by the European Community, Germany, Latvia and Sweden in 1994, by Estonia and Finland in 1995, by Denmark in 1996, by Lithuania in 1997 and by Poland and Russia in November 1999. The complete Helsinki Convention is also available in PDF format (last amended in November 2008).The Helsinki Convention has various technical groups looking at different aspects of marine environmental protection for the Baltic. HELCOM Response, the group dealing with preparedness and response to marine pollution, has taken important steps recently to help Contracting parties with improving their preparedness for oiled wildlife incidents.The HELCOM Response Manual was originally written to give guidance to Baltic countries for requesting assistance from one another during a pollution emergency. An updated Manual was developed and published in December 2009 which has a new chapter on oiled wildlife response. This new chapter means that Contracting Parties can extend their cooperation to situations where national resources are not able to deal with the size or complexity of an oiled wildlife incident. HELCOM Response has also approved a formal recommendation which encourages Baltic countries to develop national oiled wildlife response plans and describes best practice and key elements to take into consideration when developing these plans. Currently awaiting formal adoption by the HELCOM Ministerial meeting, this recommendation urges Contracting Parties to HELCOM to implement it through their national legislation. A 2009 Baltic workshop on oiled wildlife response planning also gave several recommendations for beginning to put national oiled wildlife response plans into place, which will be addressed at future HELCOM Response meetings.