Attachment in the United States, the Mareva injunction in the United Kingdom and Canada and the saisie conservatoire in France and Europe have a common purpose, which is to preserve the rights of the creditor. The three procedures, however, are far from identical in effect or in means of enforcement.

The intention of the present article is to describe attachment, the Mareva injunction and saisie conservatoire, to explain their differences and similarities and then to describe the possible court challenges to them on grounds of lack of “due process”. The law of the U.S., the U.K., Canada and France will be considered.

The story of attachment is intriguing; it was lost in England and retained in the U.S., because the American colonies left the Motherland before attachment disappeared in England. France has the purest form of Admiralty proceeding, the saisie conservatoire; it is used in civil and maritime cases without the need for the writ in rem, which latter gained importance with the attack of the courts of common law on the jurisdiction of the Admiralty Court. The Mareva injunction, a modern procedure, was the culmination of a search by the U.K. courts (not Parliament) for a suitable modern replacement for the lost attachment. Attachment, in reality, lives on in the U.K. (although unused) and in my view was never abolished by statute, as this article will attempt to demonstrate.

The story of the three processes is also intriguing because of the question of human rights, due process considerations having arisen simultaneously in all four countries. Nor has the saga ended; we will hear of it for many years.

The three procedures will now be considered in turn.

American maritime law embraces three modes of taking suit, the last two of which bind the ship: (a) an action in personam, (b) an action in personam with attachment under Supplemental Admiralty Rule B1, and (c) the writ in rem under Supplemental Admiralty Rule C2. American law is distinguishable from the law of other jurisdictions by rules of procedure which are original to the U.S. and in particular by restrictions imposed by the Fifth and Fourteenth (due process) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.