Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE NEXT SEA CARRIAGE CONVENTION?
Anthony Diamond QC
On 24 January 2008 the UNCITRAL Working Group on Transport Law approved the text of a new carriage Convention and gave it the official title of “Draft Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea”. The draft will be presented to the annual session of the UNCITRAL Commission (New York, 16 June to 3 July, 2008) for final negotiations and final approval. This article contains a discussion of the legal issues raised by the text. It is, in effect, a preliminary report on the draft Convention as of February 2008. The author poses the question whether the Commission would be doing a service to the international shipping and commercial community if it approved the draft in its present form.
I. INTRODUCTION
Background
In the context of English maritime law the Hague Rules of 1924 as amended by the Protocol of 1968 (“the Hague-Visby Rules”) have come to be regarded as the central code defining the basic rights and obligations of the parties to a contract for the carriage of goods by sea. In an international context, however, those Rules have long seemed ripe for reform and probably replacement.
In the 1970s, when the task of harmonizing international maritime and trade law began to be undertaken by the United Nations Agencies, IMO,1
UNCTAD2
and UNCITRAL,3
two attempts were made to introduce new international legislation governing the subject. Those efforts resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea 1978 (“the Hamburg Rules”, sponsored by UNCITRAL) and the United Nations Convention on International Multimodal Transport of Goods 1980 (sponsored by UNCTAD). The Hamburg Rules entered into force on 1 November 1992 and have so far been ratified by 33 states, a significant degree of support but one which falls far short of that needed to produce uniformity. The Multimodal Convention attracted few ratifications and has not entered into force.
The CMI,4
which since its establishment in 1897 has taken over the much older quest for uniformity in maritime law, decided in May 1994 to set up a Working Group to
1. The International Maritime Organization, formerly the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization (IMCO).
2. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
3. The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law.
4. Comité Maritime International.
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