The international legislation on multimodal transport is in a sorry state. There is no uniform set of rules in force internationally at present. Neither the network nor uniform proposals, whether by way of private voluntary rules or through a mandatory Convention, have obtained general acceptance. Meanwhile, national laws and regional agreements have flourished and more than 20 countries are currently engaged in the process of each drawing up their national response to multimodal transportation. There is a blatant need for harmonizing those laws worldwide. Ideally, the task might have been to unify or harmonize all existing unimodal Conventions and agreements with a view to setting a uniform pattern of Transport Law, as the trend for abolishing inner peculiarities under each mode (e.g., fault in navigation and management of the ship under sea carriage) seemed to be making some progress ahead. Another approach has been taken by CMI/ UNCITRAL, using sea carriage as a base-line for extending to a door-to-door service, thus rewriting marine and multimodal transportations into one single Convention, though limiting the scope of multimodalism, which may as a result continue to go adrift through the rough seas of disparity and disuniformity of legislations.

Nearly 22 years ago the University of Southampton1 organized a seminar on the UN Convention on International Multimodal Transport of Goods 1980. The speakers included Anthony Diamond, Q.C., who has had a rather active share in the making of the CMI Draft Instrument on Transport Law. He said in 1980:

I have no doubt that the great merit of the 1980 Multimodal Convention, if it comes into general force, will be to achieve a measure of uniformity in the field of combined transport liability… I greatly regret that the topic of combined transport was not comprehensively dealt with at the same time as carriage by sea in a single Convention. [T]here can be said to be a need for the general adoption of a new Sea Carriage Convention but there is no comparable need for a Multimodal Convention.

The 1980 UN Convention did not gain international force but Judge Diamond’s premonitory views seem to have proven right and true.