Rotterdam Rules threaten road transport industry

The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea (the “Rotterdam Rules”), will be open to the States for signing at a ceremony which will take place on 23 September 2009 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. However, this Convention constitutes a serious threat to the harmonised application of laws governing the road transport industry.

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.  This provision seriously threatens the harmonised application of laws governing the road transport industry, and notably the rules relative to national and international transport contracts.

The President of the IRU Commission on Legal Affairs, Isabelle Bon-Garcin, emphasised that, “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”.

Concerning road 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;
-  disregards entirely or partially, depending on the situation, the application of the CMR Convention to international road transport operations which 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;
-  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 lowering the limit of 8.33 SDR/kg* stipulated by the CMR to 3 SDR/kg and to place the limit at 875 SDR per container, truck, semitrailer or trailer whose goods were not declared package by package, which is usually the case due to lack of technical means;
-  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 Rotterdam Rules will achieve nothing other than impose new rules on the road transport industry without even having proven whether they have been effective for the sea transport industry.  However, the consequences of this convention are expected to prove disastrous for the goods consignors as well as for the land transporters.
The IRU therefore calls upon governments, in particular those from countries who are contracting parties to the CMR Convention, not to sign the new Convention.

Source: Transportweekly