Minister of Transportation, Mr Rotimi Amaechi, said on Tuesday that the Rotterdam Rules would create a uniform set of standards that provide fairness and balance of risks between carriers and cargo owning nations.
Amaechi said this at the opening ceremony of the Validation Colloquium on the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly by Sea (Rotterdam Rules) in Abuja.
Represented by the Permanent Secretary, Alhaji Sabiu Zakari, Amaechi said that the new Convention was not only meant to balance the interests of ship owning nations.
According to him, it is also meant to modernize the law on carriage of goods, taking into consideration modern practices of e-transactions, door-to- door delivery of cargo with multi-modal transportation of goods.
” The adoption of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods by Sea 2009, also known as Rotterdam Rules is the latest international convention on carriage of goods by sea.
” The rules seek to create a uniform set of standards that provide fairness and balance of risks between cargo and carrier owning nations, as it seeks to regulate contracts for the carriage of goods wholly.”
Earlier, Mr Hassan Bello, the Executive Secretary of Nigerian Shippers Council (NSC), said that the Rotterdam Rules was signed by developed and developing countries with strong ship owning and traditional cargo interest nations.
He said that the rules made provisions for the regulation for international carriage of goods which was not considered and regulated by the previous carriage conventions.
“Many countries are going to ratify the convention and we want Nigeria to lead the role because the convention is good for Nigeria and its international trade.
“The benefit is to adopt a modern convention and it will take care of our inland shippers and our inland infrastructures like the dry ports. It comes under this very convention and if we, as importing nation, suffer loss.
“We will have more compensation from this regime than any other convention that is operational and that is why it is good for Nigeria and Africa to adopt and ratify this convention.
“Nigeria has always been part of international convention but this is a modern one and it has not come into law yet. Nigeria has signed it but yet to ratify it. Only Togo, Spain and Congo have ratified it.
He noted that the poor ratification profile of the convention had eroded the hope of operating a more unified, more balanced and modern carriage regime.
Bello, however, said that U.S. and European countries were expected to ratify the convention just as Nigeria was negotiating with other African countries on the same issue.
“So, I think the process of ratification will be set in motion by the Ministry of Transportation and Nigerian Shippers Council.
“We cannot be a shipping nation without owning ship.We are very much on it. We have signed some MoU and we are receiving a lot of proposals from investors.
“So, we are on course and in the nearest future, Nigerians will be able to own and operate ships and thereby control the trade.”
Also speaking, Justice Ibrahim Auta, the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Abuja, said the purpose of the gathering was to lay out strategies for the implementation of the Rotterdam rules in West and Central Africa.
He described the rules as revolutionary as they aimed at balancing the interests of both ship owning and cargo owning nations, noting that countries of West and Central Africa were invariably cargo owning nations.
The Chief Judge said that Federal High Court had been involved in laying down the principles of law, particularly in the area of carriage of goods by sea.
Auta further said that the court would collaborate with the courts in the two sub-regions in the area of Maritime Law reporting with uniform approach in the interpretation.
