A Legal Study Of The Indemnity Issues In The Carriage Of Goods By Sea

“Carriage of goods by sea” in the title of this thesis includes several modes of transportation such as liner shipping, voyage charter party, slot charter, time charter party, bare boat charter party and multimodal transport contract. “Indemnity” here is not between just two parties in one single contract, but relates to three parties and two contracts. However, subrogation in insurance will not be included in this article.This thesis is based on the background of Chinese law and international conventions,and studies several standard form contracts and scenarios. The thesis summarized various issues of indemnity in carriage of goods by sea. Through discussion on practical issues, I will try to point out some detects in the current law, and also provide some advice to achieve indemnity successfully.This thesis comprises six parts. Introduction is about background, range of research and literature review.Chapter one is about indemnity issues on voyage charter, slot charter and liner shipping. At the beginning of this chapter, I make a brief summary on the nature of contract about voyage charter and slot charter to explain the structure of the thesis.Since the law only provides the basic questions of charter party, the clause about indemnity mostly comes from the agreement by parties. The discussion of indemnity in voyage charter is based on GENCON 94 standard form contract. GENCON 94 has two clauses about indemnity, one is “Bill of lading Clause” and another is“Both-to-blame Collision Clause”. The voyage charter also has a special issue which is the demurrage. When it comes to CIF or FOB condition, the demurrage indemnity may depend on the articles in the purchase agreement. Section three is about indemnity clause in SLOTHIRE form. In Chinese maritime law, there is no regulation about slot charter yet, so the legislature needs to make legal clauses about it. Section four is about indemnity between contracting carrier and actual carrier in liner shipping, which is based on Article 65 of Chinese Maritime Law.Chapter two consists of two parts. The first part is about time charter and the second part is about bare boat charter. NYPE and BALTIME are two typical time charter standard forms. Employment and indemnity clause is the main basis for the owner to claim the charterer for indemnity on third parties. If the charterers order the master to sign an antedated B/L or to release cargo without original B/L, the charterers shall indemnify the owners against damages arise from this order. In this case, some Chinese judge is inclined to hold that the owner shall also be responsible for the holder of B/L and it might be very difficult for the owners to recover from the charterers. Indemnity issue in bare boat charter is much clearer than time charter and BARECON form has explicit clause regarding it.Chapter three covers indemnity cases in multimodal transport contract and transshipment. The written law on multimodal transport contract is not complete enough. In Chinese Maritime Law, there are only five clauses about it. As for the international conventions, none of the conventions on multimodal transport contract comes into effect. The multimodal transport operator is in an embarrassing condition because there is no unified regulation about indemnity problems and because of transnational and different kinds of transportation, the right to claim indemnity from actual responsible person is hard to realize.Chapter four is about the jurisdiction, governing law and limitation of actions of indemnity in carriage of goods by sea. The dispute about jurisdiction is normally due to the Arbitration Clause of charter party incorporated into the B/L. In Chinese court, to be effective, such incorporation must express the arbitration clause of adated charter party and be written on the front page of B/L. The thesis does not study the choice of law of all the contracts mentioned above. Whereas, it focuses on the choice of law problem about indemnity occurred in multimodal transport contracts. I make comparisons among several international conventions regarding the limitation of actions. Moreover, Chinese Maritime Law needs to be revised and add some supplementary articles about limitation of actions on charter party.The last part is a conclusion overall.