Rotterdam Rules
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Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates,
It is an honour for me to be here with you at the dawn of a new era for the international carriage of goods by sea. We are gathered here today in the former Van Nelle Factories. For many years this was a global hub in the world of coffee and tobacco. The premises of Van Nelle are now included in the World Heritage List of UNESCO.
Today at this unique site, we will witness an historic event. The occasion is the signing ceremony of the new Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea. It gives me great pleasure that the United Nations General Assembly decided on the 11th of December 2008 that the Convention should be known as ‘The Rotterdam Rules’.
I am aware that global experts and eminent speakers from all over the world have given many outstanding presentations on key aspects of the Rotterdam Rules. And I understand that you also have had the opportunity to get to know this interesting, modern city a bit better, thanks to a port excursion taken yesterday.
Please allow me at this point to share with you some of my views on this new Convention.
The Rotterdam Rules will provide predictability and uniformity in an area that has been characterized by uncertainty and indistinctness.
The Rotterdam Rules bring greater clarity with respect to who is responsible and liable for what, when, where and to what extent. The application of the new convention will make doing business easier and lead to a reduction in costs. It is my belief the Rotterdam Rules will help the world’s economy on its way upward. Today we take a meaningful step towards recovery of international trade. We need the Rotterdam Rules. Both in uncertain economic times and when the world’s economy is booming.
The Convention is the culmination of more than six years of intensive international negotiations. As many as 80 states and several observers from international governmental bodies and industry organizations were involved. The text of the Convention itself is a comprehensive document. It is woven from a series of interlinking compromises made by expert state representatives throughout the course of the intergovernmental negotiations. This effort was very lengthy and intensive, involving cumbersome, complex negotiations and divergent, evolving expectations. Yet we were able to work it all out in the end.
There was an urgent need for this new Convention. The Brussels Convention, known as the ‘The Hague Rules’, dates from 1924. It has not been uniformly implemented, nor uniformly applied. The liability system established in those rules has been found to be unsatisfactory in today’s economy.
Attempts were made to modernize the system through the negotiation of the 1968 Visby Protocol and the 1978 Hamburg Rules. The Hamburg Rules, in particular, represented an important and appropriate step towards modernization. Regrettably, however, no international regime governing the carriage of goods has received the same level of international acceptance as the original text of the The Hague Rules.
The system that currently governs the international carriage of goods by sea is highly fragmented. This fragmentation leads to legal uncertainty and increased transaction costs. Seaborne trade involves all transport modalities and is by far the largest in terms of both volume and value. So it has the most to lose from the current inefficiencies.
The rapid increase in container transport, which made its first appearance only half a century ago, dramatically changed the face of the industry. Modern use of container transport has made it possible to move goods more quickly, less expensively and more efficiently.
Door-to-door carriage requires a combination of several different modes of transport. But the current international legal regime governing the carriage of goods by sea is limited to port-to-port carriage.
The need for a modern and comprehensive regime governing door-to-door carriage is pressing and real. In the absence of a truly global instrument, there is a strong risk that countries might undertake to regulate multimodal transport on a national level or to develop regional approaches. Neither of these possibilities is desirable in terms of global efficiency, predictability and lower overall trade costs.
In addition, modern commerce, including transport, is increasingly turning to paperless transactions. Needless to say, outdated international maritime transport conventions cannot offer a reliable legal basis for efficient electronic transport records.
Furthermore, the existing international maritime transport regime leaves a number of important aspects of international maritime carriage unregulated. They are therefore subject to national laws by default. This aspect, too, has had a negative effect on overall harmonization in the field.
These and other concerns eventually convinced industry and Governments that the time had come to take a fresh look at international maritime conventions for the carriage of goods. The UNCITRAL Rotterdam Rules deal with a broad range of issues, many of which are novel for a uniform transport legal instrument.
No previous maritime convention, for example, has attempted to provide detailed rules on delivery or on the right of control over goods, much less in the important area of electronic records. With respect to matters already dealt with in earlier instruments, the Rotterdam Rules aim at enhancing legal certainty. The Convention codifies decades of case law and industry practice, and clarifies earlier texts where necessary.
The result is a comprehensive instrument governing international contracts of carriage from “door-to-door”. It is much better suited to the needs of today’s commerce. If this new instrument becomes as successful as we hope it will, commercial actors and those involved in the international carriage of goods will benefit from it.
I have been informed that the atmosphere during the years of negotiation was marked by cooperation and constructive efforts towards a common goal. The text of the Rotterdam Rules represents the efforts of many competing interests to build consensus and to arrive at practical and workable common solutions.
The Rotterdam Rules represent a timely step forward. May I therefore encourage you to join in this consensus and the cooperative spirit that has gone into the preparation of the Convention. I am confident that the momentum that has carried the Rotterdam Rules thus far will see them quickly put into force.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am extremely proud that the United Nations General Assembly has authorized the Netherlands to host the signing ceremony in Rotterdam. Let us here in Rotterdam, the largest port of Europe, launch a new era for the international carriage of goods by sea.