European shippers “unconvinced” on Rotterdam Rules

The head of a European shippers council expects the Rotterdam Rules, a United Nations contention for international carriage of goods to be unable to reach consensus among nations, while European ship owners push for quick ratification.
   European Shippers Council Secretary General Nicolette van der Jagt said she expects “a failure to reach consensus among different trade interests and other organizations on the content of the Rotterdam Rules, and the complexity of them will most likely result in a number of potential multimodal variants being developed around the world and not just by the European Union.”
   Meanwhile, the European Community Shipowners Associations called for "all states worldwide and particularly all EU member states, to sign up to the Rotterdam Rules at the signing ceremony in Rotterdam" on Sept. 23, and to "ratify these rules soonest so as to have the necessary modernization of cargo liability rules as well as legal certainty and uniformity worldwide."
  

The Rotterdam Rules, approved by the U.N. General Assembly in December, is a convention that aims to bring uniformity for the international carriage of goods, which has been governed by a number of maritime liability regimes. After September it will be open to adoption by individual countries as a treaty.
  

Pawel Stelmaszczyk of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy and Transport, said at an ESC seminar at the Port of Antwerp Tuesday that a European Commission study has concluded the new convention “was not conforming to the European multimodal expectations,” and would not be conducive to the EU’s wider transport policy objectives of simplification and encouragement of co-modal logistics.
  

As a result the commission intends to release proposals later this year for the development of an EU equivalent, the ESC reported.
  

ESC said the comments “shook the carrier representatives at the seminar and others who had believed the Rotterdam Rules would establish international uniformity of liability, obligations and conditions of carriage.”
  

The council said the conclusions reached by the European Commission study “independently vindicated the conclusions arrived at by the European Shippers’ Council that the Rotterdam Rules would be overly complex and discourage shippers and freight forwarders from integrating short-sea and coastal shipping in particular into their intra-European, door-to-door freight logistics.”

 “This just goes to show that a failure to reach consensus among different trade interests and other organizations on the content of the Rotterdam Rules, and the complexity of them will most likely result in a number of potential multimodal variants being developed around the world and not just by the European Union,” van der Jagt said.
  

She said while the council had come with an open mind on the issue and was open to persuasive arguments to support the rules, it left the seminar unconvinced.
  

She said as far as she was concerned the campaign to urge non-ratification of the convention would continue, and now there was a new urgency to consult with the European Commission over their proposals for a European Union alternative system for intra-European trade.
  

The World Shipping Council, which represents liner companies, and the National Industrial Transportation League, which represents U.S. shippers, have supported the Rotterdam Rules and the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris has asked government "to consider ratification" of the draft convention. The Paris-based chamber said it "stands ready to proactively facilitate business input into national and international discussions on the ratification of the Rotterdam Rules, with a view to bringing about uniformity in this important area of international law."

 

(Source: American Shipper)