A Study On Procedural Issues For Limitation Of Liability For Maritime Claims

As a unique legal system in maritime law, limitation of liability for maritimeclaims is a privilege given to the shipowners, operators, charters and other peoplerelated that the responsible parties may limit their liability for compensation for lossor damage after the occurrence of a maritime accident. In order to implement thissystem, Special Maritime Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China and thejudicial interpretations of the provisions stipulate the procedures of constitution oflimitation fund for maritime claims and procedure for registration and repayment ofdebts. They hope that the procedure problem can be solved by this procedure law andCivil Procedure Law. However, current Chinese law does not provide a completeprocedure about limitation of liability for maritime claims, which leads to, in someextent, some of the issues of judicial practice has no legal basis and even the refereecontradictory phenomena. Therefore, it is necessary to perfect the procedure system oflimitation of liability for maritime claims.Based on the limitation of liability for maritime claims procedure in our country,this paper would like to find the legislative flaw and to put forward the correspondingrevision proposal by the methods of the hermeneutic analysis, comparative analysisand other methods. Excluding the preface and conclusion, this paper consists of threeparts with the main content of each as follow:The first part is the first chapter of this paper, summary introduction of theprocedure of limitation of liability for maritime claims. This chapter describes theconcept and significance of the procedure and provides a brief overview ofinternational conventions as well as our maritime limitation of liability procedures.The second part is the second chapter to the fifth chapter, mainly discusses theapplication and examination, constitution of limitation fund for maritime claims,registration and procedure for bringing an action to confirm creditors’ rights and repayment of debts. In the second chapter, the writer introduces and compares theapplication and examination and provides the reasons. The third chapter analyzes therelationship between the procedure of constituting the fund and the procedure oflimitation of liability, and then teases out the legal rules in China and points out someproblems in legislation and practice. The fourth chapter discusses the value of theprocedure for registration and action for affirming rights and points out someproblems based on the comparative analysis. The fifth chapter is the distribution oflimitation fund. This chapter points out the importance of the creditors’ meeting, andfocuses on the difference of the creditors’ meeting in foreign legislation and Chineselaw. All in all, the second part is the main body of the article, which is based on therelevant provisions of our country and discusses the content of procedure forlimitation of liability for maritime.The third part is the sixth chapter of the article, the improvement advice ofcompleting procedure of limitation of liability for maritime claims. In this chapter, thewriter suggests that the Chinese law should stipulate a complete procedure oflimitation of liability for maritime claims.