“A ‘MAGNIFICENT AND TIMELY’ WORK CONCERNING PLACES OF REFUGE FOR SHIPS IN DISTRESS
An appreciation by Phillip Taylor MBE and Elizabeth Taylor of Richmond Green Chambers
If you’re professionally involved in the world of shipping, transport and maritime law, whether practitioner, student or academic, you need this invaluable work of reference from Lloyd’s List. It addresses one of the thorniest and most topical issues pertaining to worldwide shipping: the problem of what to do about – and where to put – a vessel foundering in distress off a coastline. Certainly this is a matter that has confounded national and city states since the early days of sail.
Significantly in the opening pages, the author quotes Pliny the Younger (who [we believe] chronicled the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 71!) who applauds the construction of a port on the Italian coast (now Citta Vechia) as a safe haven that would save countless lives. Just goes to show how long -- and longer -- the problem has been with us and which, almost two millennia later has acquired new and often horrifying dimensions, due to security issues and the risk of environmental pollution.
It is the reluctance of many coastal states to agree to -- and adhere to -- specific legal arrangements for governing ships in distress which persists as a vexed issue worldwide and which the CMI (Comite Maritime International) has sought to address in the form of the CMI draft Instrument.
It’s the author, Professor Eric Van Hooydonk, who presented a paper at the 2004 Vancouver Conference entitled ‘The obligation to offer a place of refuge to a ship in distress. A plea for granting a salvage reward to ports and an international convention on ports of refuge.’ This paper has provided the legal underpinning for the work which the CMI continued to do.
So, in just under 500 pages, the book presents a detailed analysis of the CMI draft Instrument in all its aspects. At the same time it examines developments within the IMO and European States, together with a review of current international law and a summary of leading papers and commentaries on this topic written over the last twenty years.
The scholarship involved is precise and formidable and in this copiously footnoted work, you’ll find the expected and useful research tools, including extensive tables of international instruments, EU legislation and general legislation, as well as Tables of Cases and an extensive bibliography. As is pointed out in the Foreword, this is an invaluable source of information and knowledge, not only about the CMI draft Instrument, but about the ‘enormous international legal source material that exists, but which so far has been very difficult to access’ – as compelling a reason as any to rush out and purchase this book.
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Places of Refuge: International Law and the Cmi Draft Convention (Lloyd's Shippping Law Library)Eric Van Hooydonk