Transport Documents in the Light of the Rotterdam Rules

Abstract

This paper studies “Transport Documents in the light of the Rotterdam Rules”. It explains the meaning and types of the transport documents under the Rotterdam Rules comparing with those under the Hague, Hague-Visby and Hamburg Rules. The question of the extent to which the provisions of the Rotterdam Rules regarding the transport documents covers the practical needs is addressed herein.

This paper concludes that the Rotterdam Rules create its own law with respect to the transport documents and generalises all types of documents used in practice for carriage under the name of transport documents. The Rotterdam Rules have some advantages such as the coverage of the electronic transport document and the document for multimodal transport with a sea leg and some disadvantages such as the lack of direct connection with the practice. Ultimately, the Rules can be evaluated as good or bad only in the future after they have been in use, and the question whether the Rotterdam Rules is the only alternative for the unification of transport laws of the Hague and Hamburg regimes will then be answered. Do we all have time for that?