Ship Oil Pollution Damage Compensation Legal Issues

Petroleum is the biggest pollution substance in the sea environment, and ship oil pollution holds the most proportion of the oily pollution in the sea. The result of ship oil pollution is very serious, which brought many bad effects to the entironment and human's economic activities. With the development of our country's economy, annual increase of import petroleum and the daily frequency of the activities of oil transportation at sea, the damage of ship oil pollution has become a great problem that our country has to face. Nevertheless, relevant legal system regarding damage compensation of vessels' oil pollution of our country is still not integrated. In this regard, strengthen the researches of relevant legal problem regarding damage compensation of oil pollution in our country has very important practical significance.By comparison of the international conventions and advanced countries' internal legislation, this thesis summarized the legal system regarding damage compensation of ship oil pollution and analyzed the character, liability principle of the liability of damage compensation of ship oil pollution as well as some problems that should be paid attention to during our country's legislation of damage compensation of ship oil pollution. Meanwhile, this thesis expounded the ship oil pollution legislation status and oil pollution status of our country. This thesis also analyzed the characteristics and the status of our country's damage compensation of ship oil pollution and brought out some problems therein on the basis of investigation.This thesis researched into the international legal system of oil damage compensation, which was constituted by civil liability convention and fund convention, and their latest legislation development. In the same time, this thesis introduced the civil liability convention of fuel pollution and studied the compensation legal system of ship oilpollution in USA and Canada. Based on the aforesaid, this thesis summarized the characteristics and development trend of international legislation of oil pollution compensation. This thesis further expounded the scope of damage compensation regarding ship oil pollution under different regime of international conventions and different country's legal system. By combing to the regulations of IOPC Fund and its practice in handling claims as well as the scope of oil pollution compensation accepted in our legal practice, this thesis discussed the scope that should be included in our country's legislation.This thesis also provided some ideas of improving our country's legal system of ship oil pollution compensation and the advices for legislation of the same from the aspects of establishing compensation fund and compulsory insurance (financial guarantee) etc., by which the writer hope to provide some reference for our relevant government of legislation and decision-making and further protect the reasonable exploitation and utilization of marine environment as well as protect the legal rights of the victims ship oil pollution.