Documentation Under The Rotterdam Rules With A Comparative Analysis Of The Hague-Visby Rules, The Hamburg Rules, and The Rotterdam Rules

International carriage of goods involves not only the shipper or the carrier but also third parties who trade the documents, the consignee, financial institutions, other parties who perform the carrier's duties and more. When the cargo is handed over to the carrier a transport document is issued to show important details related to the cargo and parties to the contract of carriage. Moreover, other parties who might have interest in cargo would not be present to see the actual cargo while being delivered to the carrier. However, they can rely on the transport documents for the information they need. Therefore, it is important to regulate transport documents so that they are clear and beneficial to all parties. The Rotterdam Rules intended to establish uniformity, provide a better legal framework to regulate international carriage of goods wholly or partly by sea, and meet the needs of an evolving industry. The Rotterdam Rules regulate rights and duties of the parties throughout door-to-door carriage. It is argued that this expansion would benefit cargo interests because their whole transportation would be covered by a single convention. This thesis aims to analyse how the Rotterdam Rules deal with transport documents. It further analyses whether the Rules provide a better framework than earlier conventions and current practices. It is argued that the convention provides comprehensive and useful rules to identify parties to the transport documents and to clarify rights and duties of the carrier, the shipper and the recipient. However, the carrier’s identity issues are not totally solved in the cases where there are equally clear but inconsistent statements on the transport documents. It is suggested that presuming the registered owner of the vessel to be the carrier would cause problems especially where the registered owner does not have any direct relationship with the sub-charterers. Besides, the register owner would be responsible for problems occurring outside the sea-leg of multimodal carriages that it does not operate or control. Covering all types of documents available in practice could be useful to provide uniformity. The issuance or a contemplation of the issuance of a bill of lading is not necessary for the application of the Rules, which allows the convention to cover more transportations. The convention also gives flexibility to traders to use electronic transport records, which could be compatible with the Electronic Trade Documents Act 2023 (the ETDA). The Rules makes an electronic record functionally equivalent to a paper transport document, which could work effectively the ETDA. On the other hand, the Rules seem too complex while dealing with carrier’s delivery obligations and may not provide a better solution than current letter of indemnity practice where a bill of lading is not available to demand delivery. Issues would mainly arise if the carrier requests delivery instructions from the shipper or the documentary shipper because they may have no interest in the cargo anymore after the transfer of the transport document or they may not be willing to instruct the carrier to avoid potential liabilities arising from such an instruction.