With sixteen countries having signed up to the new UN Convention and four to go in order for the Rotterdam Rules to carry any weight, a few dissenters have announced their refusal to sign. Sharon Gill looks at who's dissing what ...
The new Rotterdam Rules will not only apply to the international carriage of goods by sea but also to the land transport of goods preceding or following the maritime segment.
According to the International Road Transport Union (IRU), this provision constitutes a serious threat to the harmonised application of laws governing the road transport industry.
The primary bones of contention seem to be the carrier liability limits and conflict with existing conventions.
The transportation industry has, over the years, been governed by a series of conventions, including the Hague Rules, the Visby Protocol and the Hamburg Rules (maritime), the Warsaw Convention and its successor the Montreal Convention (air), the CMR Convention (road), the CMNI Convention (inland waterways) and the COTIF Convention (rail), among others.
The European Shippers' Council says that the Rotterdam Rules could put some shippers in a worse position than they were in prior to the introduction of the original Hague Rules.
According to the ESC, the Rotterdam Rules:
- conflict with other conventions
- present unequal obligations and liabilities between shippers and carriers
- present a risk that carriers may significantly reduce their own limits of liability and obligations under so-called ‘volume contracts'
- make proving fault harder for the shipper
- make it increasingly difficult for shippers to successfully make a claim for damages
- make shipper obligations far more onerous
- may deter shippers from integrating short-sea shipping into their door-to-door logistics due to obligations and limits of liability being worse than under individual modal conventions
Isabelle Bon-Garcin, president of the IRU Commission on legal affairs, said: "Under the pretext of standardising maritime law, the Rotterdam Rules dismantle the unity of current laws regulating road transport from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and create an inequity between sea-land transport and land only transport."
More specifically:
- The new Convention disregards the application of national legislation to the land portion of a sea-road transport operation, even when it is based entirely (Austria, Belgium, Norway) or partially (France, Spain, etc.) on the CMR Convention.
- It disregards entirely or partially, depending on the situation, the application of the CMR Convention to international road transport operations that have a sea transport leg either at the beginning or the end of the operation. This means that an international road transport operation could be subject to the conditions of both the CMR and the Rotterdam Rules, with all of the resulting disadvantages and confusion.
- It deprives transport operators of the benefits that the national road transport legislation or the CMR offers, particularly in terms of compensation in case of loss or damage. The Rotterdam Rules provide for reducing the value -per-kg limit stipulated by the CMR and to set a value-per-unit (container, truck, trailer, etc.) when goods are not declared package by package, which is usually the case due to lack of technical means.
- It exposes the contracting parties of the CMR Convention to a dual violation of international law, as stipulated in Article 1.5 of the CMR Convention - which forbids the parties to make amendments to the law in any way through special agreements, and Article 41 of the Vienna Convention on the law of treaties - which forbids any unauthorised amendments to a multilateral convention (such as the CMR).
The IRU claims that the Rotterdam Rules will achieve nothing other than impose new rules on the road transport industry with no proof that they are even effective for the marine transport industry, and is urging governments - particularly those from countries who are contracting parties to the CMR Convention - to decline to sign the new Convention.
IRU's Canadian Member Association, the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), has informed IRU of the Canadian government's formal decision not to sign the Rotterdam rules.
CTA vice president Ron Lennox said: "CTA has not been supportive of the Rotterdam Rules, primarily because it would set up two separate liability regimes for land transport in this country."
And Transport Canada issued a statement saying that, taking into account the diverse views among stakeholders and the need for further consultations on some of its provisions, particularly those related to domestic carriage of goods by water, Canada will not be signing the new Convention in Rotterdam.
