BRUSSELS (AFP) -- One year after the Prestige disaster off Spain, the European Union continues to press for an international regime against the most dangerous types of tanker, inviting Russia in particular on board.

The EU last month adopted rules banning single-hull tankers carrying heavy fuel oil from EU ports.

The ban brings the EU in line with the United States, which restricted single-hull tankers carrying heavy-grade fuel from its waters three years after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

Europe was forced to act after the Prestige broke in two off northern Spain last November to produce the country's worst oil spill. Much of the regional Galician economy, dependent largely on tourism and fishing, was wrecked.

Under the new EU directive, single-hull vessels were banned as of October 23 from carrying certain grades of oil -- heavy fuel oil, heavy crude, used oil, bitumen and tar.

Whatever the type of oil cargo, the oldest single-hull vessels aged more than 23 years will disappear from EU waters from 2005.

Other single-hulled tankers will be able to use European ports until 2010 at the latest.

Tankers with a double skin are considered far safer from leakage in case of storms or collisions.

But, despite the European legislation, nothing can in principle prevent an old tanker passing through the English Channel between Britain and France, as long as it does not dock.

"We have a real and serious hope of extending worldwide steps adopted in Europe," said a spokesman for EU Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio.

"The aim is to get a timetable for the withdrawal of single-hull tankers," Gilles Gantelet said.

A key meeting comes next month when members of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) meet in London.

The EU is pressing the IMO to adopt the ban against single-hull tankers worldwide, and has said that the UN agency was expected to rule in favour of a ban in December, but that it would not take effect until April 2005.

But doubts remain over whether any international sanctions would be as stringently enforced outside Europe and the United States, notably on obligations to enforce security controls on single-hull tankers.

"It will be a compromise," one Brussels-based maritime lobbyist forecast.

Some players in the maritime industry have been highly critical of EU legislation.

Intertanko, an independent association of tanker owners, has predicted an unprecedented upheaval to sea transport in 2010, when all single-hull tankers will be banned from European ports.

If the EU fails to further its quest for global legislation through the IMO, it will continue bilateral talks with its neighbors, mainly Russia and surrounding Mediterranean countries.

The single-hulled, Liberian-registered Prestige got into difficulties off Spain's northwestern Galician coast on November 13 last year.

After drifting helplessly for six days it sank on November 19, leaking some 50,000 tons of oil into the sea in one of the world's worst ever oil spills.

The environmental group WWF puts the spillage figure at 64,000 tons.

The Prestige's hulk now lies beneath 4,000 meters (13,200 feet) of water, still leaking remnants of its estimated 77,000-tonne load.