A Study On The Legal Issue For The Establishment Of Insurance Mode Of Oil Pollution Liability With Chinese Characteristics

Risks of oil pollution in global sea transportation rise with the increase of oil transportation. Over the last several years, China saw a surge of oil consumption and has become the world's second largest oil import country. Frequent sea transportation of oil has increasingly deteriorated oil pollution. Although entered International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage as early as in January 5^th 1999, China, for some reasons, is still out of International Convention on Fund for Compensation for oil Pollution Damage. In spite of relative regulations of the Ministry of Communications that any international shipping vessels including bulk and oil carriers with gross tonnage of 2000 or above should buy compulsory Insurance of Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, situations like lack of payment entity and insufficiency of solvency capability increase. Due to China's shipping situation that there are mostly small and old ships and ship conditions are bad, China now has no independent and integrated oil pollution liability insurance system, and no specialized law has clear specifications for oil pollution liability, even including the Maritime Code of The People's Republic of China. The author of this paper suggests that an oil pollution liability insurance mode should be established as soon as possible, which should be in line with China's current situation and with Chinese characteristics.By analyzing China's oil pollution damage and liability insurance situation, referring to the development course of oil pollution liability of the international community and the experience and advanced notions of other insurance systems, such as environment liability insurance, motor vehicles compulsory liability insurance, agriculture insurance, this paper, through comparison, researches common ground and draws experience from them. With investigations and researches of maritime administration department, shipping enterprises, education and scientific units, the knowledge about ship oil pollution and anti-pollution approaches is gathered, which is combined with insurance principle and related knowledge, and finally insurance mode reform and innovation is put forward. Based on the feasibility analysis of the oil pollution liability compulsory insurance, the author suggests a mode of combination of compulsory and selective insurance. Given the situation that the current insurance market for oil pollution liability is not active and insurance companies keep a wait-and-see attitude, the author suggests an insurance mode which is characteristics of combination of policy and commerce. In this way, the insurance market will be stimulated by economic stimulus, guiding mechanism, financial premium subsidy, taxation preference.