Research Of Compensation Between Consignor And Third Party In The Multimodal Transportation

With the development of container transportation, the traditional transportationmodel has extended from "port to port delivery" to "door to door delivery" ininternational trade since the nearly thirty years. Therefore the habitual seatransportation, land transportation or air transportation have gradually developed intocombined transportations from beginning point to ending point, including seatransportation, land transportation and air transportation.The multimodal transportation operators, as the organizer of the wholetransportation, are not able to and not necessary to undertake all the services bythemselves. More often than not, they will undertake parts of the whole services andoutsource the rest services or the whole services to the third party, namely othersection operators, agents and their employees etc. And on such occasions of goodsloss, goods shortage or delay of goods delivery, the consignor can bring out acompensation lawsuit to the third party if the consignor can determine it is the thirdparty that is responsible for the occurrences mentioned above. But because of the factthat there is no direct contractual relationship between the consignor and the thirdparty, the compensation lawsuit can only be brought out in the name of infringementlawsuit and be compensated the whole sums of loss. So under such circumstances, thethird party fulfills his due obligations to realize the consignor's interests but can notenjoy some relevant compensation limit clauses from the transportation conventionsto protect their legitimate rights, which really poses great obstacle to the fasterdevelopment of multimodal transportations.In order to probe into this problem, the thesis starts with the involvement ofcompensation liabilities by the third party. Firstly, the thesis gives the definitions andrelations of every party in the multimodal transportation, and explains the role andstatus of every party. Next, the thesis discusses the compensation liabilities of thethird party from the perspectives of compensation liability origin, compensation basis,delay of goods delivery, liability period and liability limit respectively. Later on, thethesis moves on to explain the reason and motivation of consignor's choice of thethird party for compensation and the basic stance on such issue in Europe andAmerica. And finally, the thesis gives two recommended solutions to such issue andits reference significance from such solutions' diversification perspective.