| Summary: | 碩士 === 東吳大學 === 法律學系 === 97 === The United Nations General Assembly adopted the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea on 11 December 2008, and authorized the opening for signature of the Convention on 23 September 2009 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It recommended that the rules embodied in the Convention be known as "The Rotterdam Rules."
Since 2002, the Working Group on Transport Law of UNCITRAL cooperated with international inter-governmental and non-governmental organizations to prepare a legislative text on issues relating to the international carriage of goods. The draft Convention was prepared over thirteen sessions of the Working Group from April 2002 to January 2008, and was approved by UNCITRAL in July 2008.And then it was sent to the General Assembly for adoption at its current 63 rd session.
The new project of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) was designed to develop a new international convention to replace the UN Convention on the Carriage of Goods by Sea (commonly known as the Hamburg Rules), the International Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules of Law Relating to Bill of Lading, 1924(commonly known as the Hague Rules) and Protocol to Amend the International Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules of Law Relating to Bills of Lading, 1968 (commonly known as the Hague Visby Rules). If the project can be successful adopted, the new convention will supersede these three popular liability regimes.
The Rotterdam Rules aims to create a contemporary and uniform law providing for modern door-to-door container transport including an international maritime transport, but not limited to port-to-port carriage of goods. The question of whether the Rotterdam Rules should apply only to sea-carriage port-to-port or also to multimodal transport involving sea-carriage was of considerable importance and persisted to be the particularly debatable subject during the period of drafting convention. The current framework of international multimodal transport is complex and fragmented. At the same time, the proportion of multimodal transport is growing exponentially. The Rotterdam Rules seeks to address this situation by extending a substantively maritime liability regime, prepared by representatives of only the maritime sector, to all multimodal contracts involving a sea-leg. And also, there are many innovative features contained in the Convention, including provisions allowing for electronic transport records, and other features to fill the perceived gaps in existing transport regimes.
In sharp contrast with the previous international maritime transport conventions, the Rotterdam Rules was made its coverage defining by the contract of carriage. This is expected to be of substantial benefit for shippers, particularly those in developing and least-developed countries, which are consumers of transportation services. It is expected that harmonization and modernization of the legal regime in this area, which in many countries dates back to the 1920s or earlier, will lead to an overall reduction in transaction costs, increased predictability when problems are encountered, and greater commercial confidence when doing business internationally.
Due to the Rotterdam Rules has been drawn up; the liability regime of carriers plays a decisive role in the field of maritime transportation. This article makes an attempt to analyze the carriers’ liability regime of the maritime transport system with the three traditional international liability regimes and the new convention.
The last but not the least, the point of this article is to clarify the difference between the liability regimes of carriers of those conventions. And deeply hope to find the perfect solution between theories and practice under the Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea.
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