Establishment of unified Railway Legal System; a Necessary Step towards Development of International Transportation of Goods

Due to the growth of modern technologies and digitization, nowadays we live in a world shrinking day by day. In this situation, due to the increasing expansion of international trade and international exchange of goods, the existence of different legal systems on the route of a freight transportation contract causes problems such as the emergence of several partial contracts, the ambiguity of the rights, obligations and responsibilities of the persons concerned in contract, the increase in traffic at the borders, the rise in costs, the prolonging of shipping time and eventually the decrease of efficiency. An effective solution for the development of international transportation is the establishment of a unified and coherent legal system whose purpose is to start and end a transport with only one contract and document under the rule of a specific law. In the field of transboundary rail transportation of goods there are two major legal systems: the SMGS Convention and the CIM Rules. Many efforts have been made to harmonize these two provisions, including the "draft of Unified Railway Law". It seems, however, that currently there is not required ground and preparations for adoption a new convention to unify provisions of this area. It is therefore advisable, until the formation of such ground, to use voluntary contractual tools such as "CIM/SMGS common consignment note", Standard Contracts and the like to further harmonize the provisions of this area.