Abstract: The article deals with topical issues of ensuring security of maritime transport and preventing relevant threats based on legal measures. The scientific literature in the field of maritime law and legal means (norms, methods) of ensuring safety in maritime transport is analyzed. The variability and complexity of the nature of maritime threats and various measures to respond to them require an understanding of the policies, regulations, national civil and criminal legislation of the participating States and international public law, and therefore actualize the issues of conceptualization of international legal regulation of maritime transport security in this study. The subject of the study is the provision of safety in maritime transport through the knowledge of current trends and the substantiation of the conceptual provisions of the international legal mechanism as such. Systematic, comparative legal and dialectical approaches have been applied to generalize the essence and features of international legal regulation of safety in maritime transport. The main research methods used are diverse variations of analysis and synthesis of its results, analogy and comparison, generalization and concretization, functional cognition and deduction, abstraction, historical and formal legal methods. The main scientific result of the study is that the problem of ensuring safety in maritime transport has been studied from a legal and organizational point of view. The paper examines the formation of the legal mechanism for ensuring international security in maritime transport, defines the concept of the legal mechanism for ensuring international security in maritime transport, reveals the characteristics of the main threats to international security in maritime transport, justifies the right to ensure security in maritime transport as an institute of international maritime law, presents the results of the analysis of the existing areas of security in maritime transport, put forward proposals to improve international legislation in the field of maritime transport safety. The scientific results obtained as a result of the research can be used in educational activities when teaching the basics of international law, as well as in scientific research procedures when learning about the functioning of modern international law and its individual institutions.