Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
THE ROTTERDAM RULES
Anthony Diamond QC
This is a revised and updated edition of an article by the author entitled “The next sea carriage Convention?”.
1
The original article contained a preliminary discussion of the draft Convention as of February 2008, based on the text approved by the UNCITRAL Working Group on Transport Law on 24 January 2008. That draft was later presented to the annual session of the UNCITRAL Commission (New York,16 June to 3 July, 2008) for final negotiations and approval, in the course of which the text was amended. The approved draft was then adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 11 December 2008. This revised article contains a commentary on the official text of 11 December 2008, with a reconsidered and, in some respects, more detailed discussion of some of the legal and other issues raised by it.
I. INTRODUCTION
Background 2
In the context of English maritime law the Hague Rules of 1924 as amended by the Protocol of 1968 (“the Hague-Visby Rules”) have come to be regarded as the central code defining the basic rights and obligations of the parties to a contract for the carriage of goods by sea. In an international context, however, those Rules have long seemed ripe for reform and probably replacement. The reasons for this are various and include: (i) the effect of containerisation, including the use of contracts of combined (later called multimodal) transport; (ii) the narrow scope of the Hague-Visby Rules, which apply to contracts covered by a bill of lading or any similar document of title and only for the
1. [2008] LMCLQ 135.
2. For a more complete survey, see M F Sturley “Transport law for the twenty-first century; an introduction to the preparation, philosophy, and potential impact of the Rotterdam Rules” (2008) 14 JIML 461. That volume of the journal contains a number of articles on the Rotterdam Rules by Professor Sturley, C Hancock QC, Professor D R Thomas, Dr T Nikaki, Professor S Girvin, Dr R Asariotis, S Baughen, Professor R Williams, Dr M Goldby, Professor G J Van Der Ziel, Professor Y Baatz and Professor W Tetley QC. I shall refer to these by the author’s name followed by the citation. I am grateful to Informa for permitting me to see the proofs of a forthcoming book The Rotterdam Rules: A Practical Annotation (hereafter “RRAPA”), by Professor Y Baatz, Professor C Debattista, Dr F Lorenzon, Dr A Serdy, Professor H Staniland and Professor M Tsimplis. In the footnotes, references to contributions to the book are to the author’s name and the abbreviation “RRAPA”. Finally, I am grateful to Professor N Gaskell for allowing me to read in draft a paper “Bills of Lading in an Electronic Age”, which he delivered at the 11th Hasselby Colloquium on “General Trends in Maritime and Transport Law” at the Maritime Law Institute at Stockholm University in September 2009 and which will be published in the next issue of this Quarterly (cited here as “Gaskell [2010] LMCLQ (May)”).
LLOYD’S MARITIME AND COMMERCIAL LAW QUARTERLY
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