General Scope of Application of the Rotterdam Convention: Conflicts of Application with Other Conventions

The scope of application of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea, has some complicated provisions that are in line with the new demands in the field of transportation. Contrary to those of The Hague and Hambourg, this convention not only applies on the carriage of goods by sea, but also it applies on the other legs of carriage and as a result, extends the period of responsibility of carriers. Consequently, the scope of its application has been extended. Increasing containerized transport necessitates such an extension; however, there are other international conventions that extend their scope, based on some circumstances, beyond their boundaries. As a result of such extensions, scope of conventions may overlap. In order to overcome these overlaps, Rotterdam Convention provides some provisions within its articles. These provisions have been arranged in chapters 6 and 17. In this article, we want to study the general scope of the application of the Rotterdam Convention, and then analyze the extended scope of its application which, in this regard, causes it to become a multimodel convention on the field of transportation. After that, for the purpose of completing the issue of scope of the convention, we will deal with conflict-avoiding and conflict-resolving provisions. The result of this research will be culminated into removal of domestic legislator’s worry about the scope of application of this convention which may be resulted from Article 90 that permits no reservation to the convention. We believe that the acceptance of this convention even without any reservation causes no conflict with the scope of other conventions to which our country is a party, such as Warsaw, CMR and CIM or will be a party at the future such as Montreal and CIM 1999.