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Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly

Revisiting the Rotterdam Rules

Francesco Berlingieri

I. INTRODUCTION

The CMI has salvaged the Hague Rules 1921 by transforming them into an international Convention. It had made an (insufficient) attempt to modernise them with the Protocol of 1968. However, soon after the additional Protocol of 1979 that replaced the Franc Poincaré with the SDR, the CMI realised that the Hague-Visby Rules had become obsolete and that something had to be done in order to ensure preservation of uniformity of the law of carriage of goods by sea. The study for a new modern regime started in the 1980s, slowly developed and ended with the submission to UNCITRAL in December 2001 of the draft of a new Convention that became, after a further six years of work by the UNCITRAL Working Group on Transport Law, the United Nations Convention on Contracts for International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 11 December 2008, and opened for signature at Rotterdam on 23 September 2009. This Convention, known as the Rotterdam Rules, has not been well received by several qualified persons in England.1 After reviewing their critical analyses,2 I received from Anthony Diamond QC (to whom, for convenience, I shall generally refer as “Diamond”) a copy of his latest article on the Rotterdam Rules,3


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