Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly
The obligation to offer a place of refuge to a ship in distress
Eric Van Hooydonk *
The legal arrangements governing places of refuge and ships in distress demonstrate numerous defects. There is no unambiguous reply to the question whether such ships have the right to enter a place of refuge. In the author’s view, decision-making should be based on an assumption of access and basic principles of good management. An attempt should be made to arrive at an international Convention encouraging ports to take a more positive view of new cases of ships requiring shelter. One of the ingredients of such a Convention could be the granting of a salvage reward to port authorities
.
A. INTRODUCTION
The need for specific legal arrangements governing ships in distress and places of refuge is one of the most topical problems in both public and private maritime law. Quite apart from the headline-grabbing shipping disasters involving the loss of the Erika
(1999) and the Prestige
(2002), several other incidents, such as those involving the Castor
in the Mediterranean (2000) and the Vicky
off the Belgian coast (2003), also attracted the attention of the IMO,1
the CMI,2
the Bonn Agreement for cooperation in dealing with pollution of the North Sea,3
the European Union, the national maritime authorities, the maritime industry in general—comprising shipowners and operators, P & I Clubs, port
* Advocate at Antwerp, Senior Lecturer at the University of Antwerp, Member of the CMI International Sub-Committee on Places of Refuge. This paper is published with a more elaborate footnote apparatus in the CMI Yearbook Vancouver I
(Antwerp, 2004), 403.
The following abbreviations are used in the footnotes hereunder:
Degan: V.D. Degan, “Internal Waters” (1986) 17 Netherlands Yearbook of International Law
3;
Devine: D.J. Devine, “Ships in distress—a judicial contribution from the South Atlantic” [1996] Marine Policy
229;
de Zayas: A.-M. de Zayas, “Ships in distress” (1989) 11 Encyclopedia of public international law
287;
Hydeman and Berman: L.M. Hydeman and W.H. Berman, International Control of Nuclear Maritime Activities
(Michigan, 1960);
Van Hooydonk: E. Van Hooydonk, “Some Remarks on Financial Securities Imposed by Public Authorities on Casualty Ships as a Condition for Entry into Ports”, in M. Huybrechts (ed), E. Van Hooydonk and C. Dieryck (Co-eds), Marine insurance at the turn of the Millennium
, II (Antwerp/Groningen/Oxford, 2000) 117.
1. See http://www.imo.org/Newsroom/mainframe.asp?topic id=72 (consulted on 8 February 2004).
2. See CMI Yearbook 2002
(Antwerp, 2003), 117–146 and http://www.comitemaritime.org/worip/place.html (consulted on 8 February 2004).
3. During the 15th meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Bonn Agreement for cooperation in dealing with pollution of the North Sea by oil and other harmful substances, at Stockholm from 23 to 25 September 2003, it was decided that in 2004 a definitive chapter of the Counter Pollution Manual on Places of Refuge
would be prepared on the basis of the relevant instruments and reports of the IMO and the European institutions (including EMSA) (Summary Record, §§ 2.18–2.20).
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