On Criminal Liabilities Of Collision Accidents Between Maritime Vessels

The number of collision accidents between maritime vessels whose damage is often directly proportional to the extent of the vessels and the amount they ship,has increased highly and gradually recently,and so the seriousness of the collision does. The collision causes the property losses or even worse the injuries and deaths as well as the critical maritime pollution.According to some investigation,most of the collision accidents are due to anthropogenic factors.Current laws have some more detail regulations on the collisions in terms of civil liabilities and administrative liabilities, however only depending on those two forms of liabilities do not satisfy victims,and do not fulfill the purpose of preventing the collision accidents,either.At present,relevant criminal collision liabilities in Chinese legislation are only regulated as traffic accident crime in article 133 of China's Criminal Law,which has great technical barriers to apply directly to collision accidents,and there are not official judicial interpretations to support its application right now,leading to applying traffic accident crime to collision accidents between vessels difficultly in practice.This paper is to study on how to apply criminal liabilities to ship collisions.This paper limit the subjects investigated to the ships subject to article 3 of Chinese Maritime Code and the collision accidents to collision taking place between two vessels due to fault.Author believe that it is so important and practical to study the criminal liabilities of wreckers causing collision accident between maritime vessels,proofing by data analysis,experience summarizations,legal basis,theoretical principles and referential case practices,etc.This paper stress on analyzing the constitutive elements of the maritime traffic accident crime,that is to emphasize how to apply traffic accident crime in article 133 of Chinese Criminal Law to collision accidents between vessels in such details.The criminal object of maritime traffic accident crime is regular maritime navigation order and maritime environment,moreover the criminal objective respects of which is violations against regulations on maritime transportation,leading to serious maritime traffic accidents with injures,death or crucial oil pollution.The criminal subject of this crime is persons who engage specifically in maritime transportation business directly relate to protecting maritime traffic safety,including captains,ship owners,ship operators,ship managers,crew and pilots or other persons assuming direct liabilities to collision accidents.The crime subjective aspect is fault.There are always some difficulties and deficiencies to apply article 133 of Chinese Criminal Law directly to maritime collision accidents because of curtain distinctiveness of maritime transportation business.The difficulties or deficiencies focus on how to define the boundary between the crime and non-crime and how to deal with the compatibility procedurally.In view of those situations,author suggests that drawing up relevant judicial interpretations solves above-said problems or we can lay down "major navigation accident crime" according to "major air accident crime" in Chinese Criminal Law.