In December 2001 the Comité Maritime International delivered to UNCITRAL a Draft Instrument on Transport Law. This document was substantially reproduced by UNCITRAL as a Preliminary Draft Instrument on the Carriage of Goods by Sea and this Preliminary Draft Instrument was considered by the UNCITRAL Working Group on Transport Law at its ninth session in New York in April 2002. This paper explains the scope of the CMI Draft Instrument and the background to its preparation. It also summarizes the position following the session in New York and indicates how the project may progress in the future.

On 11 December 2001 the Comité Maritime International (“CMI”) delivered to UNCITRAL a Draft Instrument on Transport Law.1 The completion of this Draft Instrument represented the culmination of 3 1/2 years’ intensive work by the CMI on its issues of transport law project. The project began in May 1998, when the CMI set up an International Working Group. However, its origins go back to 1996. At its 29th Session in 1996, UNCITRAL considered a proposal to include in its work programme a review of current practices and laws in the area of international carriage of goods by sea. This proposal arose out of UNCITRAL’s work on electronic commerce, which culminated in the establishment of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce in 1996. This work exposed the fact that there were significant gaps regarding issues such as the functioning of bills of lading and sea waybills, the relationship between those documents and the rights and obligations between the seller and buyer of goods and the legal position of entities that provided financing to a party to the contract of carriage. It was decided at the 29th Session that the UNCITRAL secretariat should be the focal point for gathering information, ideas and opinions as to the problems that arose in practice and possible solutions to those problems. It was also agreed that such information gathering should be broadly based and should include, in addition to governments, the international organizations representing the commercial sectors involved in the carriage of goods by sea, such as the CMI, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Union of Marine Insurance, the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations and the International Chamber of Shipping.2 It was subsequently agreed that the CMI should take the lead and, together with the international organizations, organize further work on the

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