Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
BOOK REVIEW - EU MARITIME TRANSPORT LAW
Simon Baughen
Professor of Shipping Law, Swansea University
EU MARITIME TRANSPORT LAW. Henning Jessen, Professor of Law, University of Hamburg, and Michael Jürgen Werner, Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP, Brussels. Hart/Nomos, Oxford (2016) 1504 pp. Hardback £303.
The result of the United Kingdom European Union Membership Referendum has, ironically, greatly increased interest in the law of the EU. Many shipping lawyers will have woken up on the morning of 24 June 2016 wondering how the UK’s departure from the EU would affect maritime law, which would then lead in turn to a question as to just what constitutes EU maritime law. At the time the principal reference work would have been the second edition of Dr Vincent Power’s EC Shipping Law, published in 1998 (a new edition is due in October 2018). Since then much has changed, not least the metamorphosis of the European Community into the European Union. Fortunately, the week before the referendum saw the publication of European Maritime Transport Law, which sets out the legislative corpus of EU maritime law as of December 2015.
The book is a monumental undertaking, totalling 1239 pages of text, and is written by a team of 15 distinguished academics and practitioners, under the editorship of Henning Jessen and Michael Jurgen Werner. Apart from the general introduction in Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, the book adopts the commentary form. The chapters start with a general introduction to the applicable theme and then provide sub-chapters providing a detailed commentary on the provisions of each of the applicable EU Regulations and Directives.
EU maritime law now covers a wide range of public and private law aspects of shipping, and is intertwined with the global regulatory capacity exercised through the International Maritime Organisation (“IMO”). The EU is not a member of the IMO but the Commission has observer status. However, Member States’ actions as IMO members are constrained in matters where the EU has external competence. In Commission v Greece (IMO) (C-45/07) the ECJ found that Greece had breached TEC, Arts 10, 71 and 80(2) when it had submitted a unilateral proposal to the IMO regarding the ISPS Code, which could lead to new IMO rules likely to affect the provisions of Regulation EC/725/2004 on Enhancing Ship and Port Facility Security. The EU, however, has been increasingly ready to legislate in areas covered by IMO agreements and to impose stricter standards to those covered by the IMO agreements. This “gold plating” of IMO measures has been apparent in the Sulphur Directive. Directive 2012/33 stipulated a limit of 0.5% to apply outside emission control areas as from 1 January 2020, whereas the then limit under Annex VI of MARPOL could have remained at 3.5% until 2025. This potential disparity was removed in October 2016, when the IMO agreed that the 0.5% limit should apply as from 1 January 2020.
The book is divided into five chapters, each addressing a separate theme of EU maritime law. Chapter 1 sets out the overall regulatory framework for maritime law in the EU and
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