Issues concerning legal support of international shipping

Abstract

The article focuses on international shipping governed by regulatory sources of a dual nature. This circumstance is due to the fact that international shipping is regulated both by international legal sources, for example, conventions, international treaties and customs, and by domestic legislation and judicial practice of the countries participating in international transportation. The research findings have indicated that, unfortunately, in practice there are often cases when the norms of national or international law have loopholes. Thus, a number of provisions of the International Shipping Rules do not coincide with the Russian Charter of Water Transport. In addition, the concept of “bill of lading” is often used in international law and is absent in Russian legislation. Therefore, the author proposes to eliminate the existing loopholes causing either high costs or litigation by finalizing national and international legislation. In this regard, the author considers specific examples and makes appropriate proposals aimed to close the identified loopholes in international and national legislation in order to minimize the costs and losses of the parties to the international transport agreement, and to reduce the number of controversies. Such urgent problems as the problem of piracy and the problem of pollution of the seas and oceans by ships also arise in freight forwarding business. The author proposes to toughen measures of responsibility for maritime piracy and for pollution of the seas and oceans by ships at the legislative level.