The Legal Study On Places Of Refuge For Ships In Distress

Since the conception of Places of Refuge for Ships in Distress was put forward by the legal committee of the International Maritime Organization in the 1980s, there has been an endless debate on this issue. The issues of whether the coastal countries have the obligation to provide places of refuge for ships in distress, who should be responsible for the various damages including the environmental pollution caused by distressed ships, where do the compensation fees come from, and whether it is necessary to establish a uniform international convention, immediately become hot topics in related international organizations. The maritime experts also set forth their own views on those questions in academic literature. At the same time, serious maritime accidents happened continuously. The distressed"Erika","Castor"and"Prestige"tankers were all rejected by the coastal countries because of their high pollution threat to maritime environment and became the"abandoned children"in maritime field, which finally drew the attention of the international community. The Comite Maritime International set up a special sub-committee to do research on the issues of places of refuge. The International Maritime Organization appointed its Sub-committee on Safety of Navigation to establish a working group for the investigation in this respect, on the basis of which the Guidelines on Places of Refuge for Ships in Need of Assistance and the Directives on Maritime Assistance Service were finally instituted. The European Traffic Monitoring Directive was issued by the European Union on June 27 2002, which requested its member states to draft an action plan to take over the distressed ships in their waters as soon as possible. Having been exposed to the blames from the international community, the coastal countries also began to devote themselves to the research on the problems of places of refuge, among which the United States, Australia and some European countries have established the comparatively perfect systems of places of refuge. However, due to the lack of a uniform stipulation applied to the international society, the coastal nations used to make decisions on their own motions in practice without considering other related parties'interests, which resulted in the uncertainty in resolving the problems of places of refuge. Given that, there have been much wider speculations for the construction of a uniform suitable international convention on places of refuge. As far as China is concerned, both the theoretical study and the system construction of places of refuge lag behind other significant maritime countries. None of the Maritime Law, the Maritime Environment Protection Law or the Maritime Transport Safety Law has special stipulations on places of refuge. Moreover, no relevant systems, agencies and technical facilities have been established. With the adjustment of the energy supply structure and the implementation of the energy strategy in China, the amount of oil products transported by sea will go up continuously. At the same time, the threat of pollution to our coastal environment caused by maritime accidents will increase accordingly. Therefore, the urgent task on hand is to constitute the correspondent stipulations, strengthen the construction of the maritime safety system, and establish the mechanism of places of refuge. The essence of this problem is that no matter what preventing measures may be taken, maritime accidents may be reduced but they will always happen. Thus, the most troublesome problem is how to establish a complete contingency system network at the international, regional and national levels to deal with the potential accidents in the future. This is the point that this article intends to contribute to from the theoretical and practical perspectives.