Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE PACKAGE OR UNIT LIMITATION AND THE VISBY RULES
El Greco
v. Mediterranean Shipping
I recollect once asking an older colleague why a member of our faculty had (long before the recollections of those around today) not had his appointment renewed. The reply was: ‘‘Well, if you asked him a question, it was as if you had reached up to the top of a bookshelf to take down a book, and all the books in the shelf collapsed down on to you.’’ The decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia in El Greco (Australia) Pty Ltd
v. Mediterranean Shipping Co SA
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reminded me of that comment. What starts as a fairly small point as to what is a ‘‘unit’’ in the context of Art IV, r 5(c) of the Hague-Visby Rules (the container provision added by the Visby Protocol) is answered with full reference to the text of the Rules, principles of interpretation of international Conventions, extensive quotation from the travaux préparatoires
, discussion of (relevant but inconclusive) American authority, consideration of the extent to which what are packages or units depends on the agreement of the parties, and much else. But the judgments are likely to need to be referred to on several unresolved points in connection with the Rules, and hence despite their total length require careful study. The travaux préparatoires
, as usual, reveal interesting but inconclusive information.
Posters and prints were shipped from Australia to Greece via Antwerp, which apparently constituted the entire contents of a container. The bill of lading referred to ‘‘1 × 20 ft FCL/FCL general purpose containers said to contain 200945 pieces posters and prints’’ ‘‘shippers load stow and count’’. The goods arrived damaged by seawater and in effect valueless. One of the questions was whether the single posters and prints were the ‘‘units’’ for the purposes of Art IV, r 5(a), or whether the container was. Obviously, each poster was worth far less than the limitation sum; but if that sum was to be applied to the container there was substantial uncompensated loss. To complicate matters, it was agreed that the total figure was in fact overstated by about 70,000; and that the posters were in fact made up into about 2,000 packages.
What follows seeks to draw attention briefly to the main points on which the case deserves study.
‘‘Unit’’
Article IV, r 5(a) of the original Hague Rules established a limitation per package or unit. As is well known, a new clause, para (c), was inserted into Art IV, r 5 of the Hague Rules
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