Study On International Admiralty Litigation Jurisdiction

Compared to general civil litigations,maritime litigations always involve international elements,and it is common that jurisdictional links exist between one maritime dispute and multiple countries,which not only makes it convenient for the parties to choose where to plead,but also brings the problem of parallel proceedings.It is the right of a prosecutor to choose the most appropriate court to adjudicate its maritime disputes,embodying the principle of autonomy in the parties’ exercising litigation rights,and it is also the inevitable result of the operation of the regime of parallel jurisdiction.Therefore,compared to determining one sole competent court for each type of case through international convention,and overthrowing the fact that there will be more than one competent courts for one specific maritime dispute,it is currently more feasible to consider optimizing admiralty litigation jurisdiction regimes,reducing the number of competent courts as far as possible,and in the meantime,discuss possible proposals for coordination of jurisdictional conflicts between competent courts based on effective application of relevant mechanisms and jurisdictional principles.To this end,it is necessary to analyze the international admiralty litigation jurisdiction regime,and discuss its typical and outstanding problems.International admiralty litigation jurisdiction concerns the exercise of jurisdiction over international maritime disputes.The definition of international admiralty litigation jurisdiction involves the following aspects.Firstly,it is different from but highly related to legislative jurisdiction;secondly,it is different from domestic admiralty litigation jurisdiction,it settles the allocation of jurisdiction among courts of different states;thirdly,the word “admiralty” should be interpreted in a broad sense.Given the importance attached to international admiralty litigation jurisdiction,including its significance to admiralty proceedings and the national interests and the benefit of parties involved,current international admiralty litigation jurisdiction regime mainly based on domestic rules is vast,complicated and conflicting.Coordinating such conflicts requires the optimization of international admiralty litigation jurisdiction regime,which can be reached through objective-oriented completion of contractual jurisdiction,exclusive jurisdiction,jurisdiction based on preservation measures and parallel jurisdiction respectively under the guidance of general principles.The most prominent issue of contractual jurisdiction is the validity of jurisdictional agreements.Contractual jurisdiction can be defined as a jurisdictional basis that follows the principle of autonomy and grants jurisdiction to the court nominated by the agreement reached between the parties.It should be taken as the opposite of legal jurisdiction,separate from exclusive jurisdiction and parallel jurisdiction.On the whole,contractual jurisdiction is not only the embodiment of the principle of autonomy in international private law,but also an important tool to protect the reasonable expectation of the parties and coordination the conflict of international admiralty litigation jurisdiction.In facing the fact that states tend to set various restrictions on the validity of choice of court agreements,especially the jurisdictional clauses of B/Ls,it is necessary for judicial reviews against jurisdictional agreements to be directed towards a ‘pro-agreement’attitude,which means that courts of different countries should be supportive in facing the parties’ choice of court,or in other words,to recognize the validity of jurisdictional provisions of B/Ls as far as possible.As to the reality that the answers given by different courts with regard to whether or not a choice of court agreement is valid are often different,it is also advisable to unify the law applicable to jurisdictional clauses,and the law that would be applied by the court chosen should be the answer to that.The key issue regarding exclusive jurisdiction is the limits of its application.The internationalization of exclusive jurisdiction regime is not simply advocating to narrow the scope of exclusive jurisdiction,instead,it discusses the rationalization of its scope based on the internal logic of exclusive jurisdiction and its compulsory effect.States should determine the disputes that fall under the regime of exclusive jurisdiction following the principle of necessity and that of international coordination,and advocates application of exclusive jurisdiction regime within a reasonable scope while paying attention to strengthen its effective usage.The key issue of admiralty litigation jurisdiction based on preservation measures is its effective application.Admiralty litigation jurisdiction based on preservation measures is exceptional for admiralty litigation jurisdiction,and it refers to the jurisdiction obtained on the basis of the taking place of preservation measures.Following the interpretation of the word “preservation”,maritime preservation measures include all measures with the legal attributes of preservation that take preservation as their purposes.Which means,maritime evidence preservation should be included as maritime preservation measures in the context of admiralty litigation jurisdiction based on preservation measures.For the coordination between admiralty litigation jurisdiction based on preservation measures and cross-border insolvency proceedings and that between admiralty litigation jurisdiction based on preservation measures and LLMC proceedings,it is possible to consider the regime of “mutual recognition”,and for the former conflict it is advisable to set a coordination framework under the theory of modified universalism,and for the latter a mechanism focusing on not to lower the subordination to compensation of specific maritime claimants.The key problem of parallel jurisdiction is the coordination of conflicts originated therefrom.Different from the concept of parallel jurisdiction in international civil jurisdiction,the admiralty parallel jurisdiction only refers to those specified by laws and regulations but with no exclusive effect.The fact that parallel jurisdiction regime involves many connection nodes and large amounts of regulations determines that the problem of parallel litigation caused by it is relatively significant.Coordination of these conflicts can be achieved from both the international and domestic levels.On the one hand,promotion of unified legislation and interpretation of connection nodes at the international level is the goal that should be pursued continuously,on the other hand,states should also stick to widely recognized principles in seizing jurisdiction such as principle of international comity,so as to ease the conflict of international admiralty litigation jurisdiction.