Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE HAZARDOUS AND NOXIOUS SUBSTANCES CONVENTION: A NEW HORIZON IN THE REGULATION OF MARINE POLLUTION
Gavin Little *
The adoption of the Hazardous and Noxious Substances Convention by the International Maritime Organization in 1996 brought a long and convoluted negotiation process to an end. The Convention seeks inter alia to provide a uniform international regime for the determination of questions of liability and the provision of compensation for those suffering damage caused by spills at sea of hazardous and noxious substances. It is therefore likely to be an important development for the shipping and insurance industries, and environmentalists. Although the Convention will not be implemented for some time, it has been incorporated into United Kingdom legislation, thereby inviting evaluation and comment. The likely effectiveness of the Convention is assessed from the perspective of future UK claimants and environmental protection in particular The author concludes that, while the Convention represents an important step forward, it also has a number of potentially significant defects, which should not go unchallenged.
The Hazardous and Noxious Substances Convention (“the Convention”) was adopted by the International Maritime Organization (“the IMO”) on 3 May 1996. It has as its object the establishment of a system for determining liability and providing compensation for damage arising out of the carriage of specified hazardous and noxious substances at sea. As such, the Convention represents another stage in the inevitably slow development by the IMO1 and coastal States of measures to regulate the carriage of pollutants at sea, and follows in the tradition of well-established Conventions which are in place to deal with oil pollution. Indeed, the Convention has adopted, within a single agreement, the two-tier system of liability and compensation which was developed in the International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage 1969 and the International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage 1971 (now referred to as “the 1992 Liability Convention” and the “1992 Fund Convention”, following their revision by Protocol).2
* Lecturer in Law, University of Stirling.
1. See generally Gaskell, “The Draft Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage resulting from the Carriage of Hazardous and Noxious Substances,” in Wetterstein and Beijer (eds), Essays in Honour of Hugo Tiberg (Stockholm, 1996) (hereafter “Gaskell”), 225; and Goransson, “The HNS Convention” [1997] Uniform Law Review 249, 249–251.
2. On which see generally, Little and Hamilton, “Compensation for Catastrophic Oil Spills: A Transatlantic Comparison” [1997] LMCLQ 391; and Hamilton and Little, “Liability for Oil Spills: The Sea Empress and recent developments under the Merchant Shipping Act 1995” [1996] International Journal of Insurance Law 287.
554
554