U.S. DELEGATES PLEASED AS UNCITRAL-COMITE SESSION ADJOURNS
The Working Group III (Transport Law) of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law finished its ninth session on Friday afternoon at United Nations headquarters in New York, having discussed approximately half of a proposed working draft for a new international convention to harmonize rules for the carriage of goods by sea.
The draft had been prepared with help from the Comite Maritime International. U.S. delegates to the UNCITRAL-Comite session were pleased that their ‘most wanted’ points remained in that part of the text that had been approved by Friday. The session decided to wait until a fall meeting in Vienna to determine whether the scope of the convention would be ‘door-to-door,’ in the widest intermodal sense, or only ‘port-to-port,’ basically within the perimeters of present maritime regimes.
Also left open was were running debates on whether shippers are intrinsically weaker than carriers and thus need added protections, and on the flexibility that an international convention might give third parties to maritime contracts.