The concept of a general average is the oldest institution of maritime law. Its usefulness in modern shipping relations has long been criticized. Nevertheless, the general average, despite the fact that it is not the subject of any international agreement, occupies a prominent place in the internal legal systems of maritime states, and the international community continues to show great interest in it, regularly changing the principles of accounting established in the second half of the 19th century in York and Antwerp. During the work on the draft of the new Polish Maritime Code, the Maritime Law Codification Commission made some changes in the regulations concerning the general average, adapting the provisions of Polish law to new solutions proposed by participants of international maritime trade and non-governmental organizations, including Comité Maritime International.
At the end of August 2012 the Polish Parliament enacted the Act on State Marine Accident Investigation Commission, which regulates its organization and operation. The Act transposed, within its regulation, Directive 2009/18/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 establishing the fundamental principles governing the investigation of accidents in the maritime transport sector and is based on the Code of the International Standards and Recommended Practices for a Safety Investigation into a Marine Casualty or Marine Incident (Casualty Investigation Code), issued by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) together with amendments to the SOLAS Convention. The purpose of the Directive, as well as the Casualty Investigation Code, is to improve maritime safety and the prevention of pollution by ships by facilitating the expeditious holding of safety investigations and proper analysis of marine casualties and incidents in order to determine their causes. The EU Parliament obliged, through the Directive, the EU Member States to ensure that the safety investigations are conducted under the responsibility of an impartial permanent investigative body, endowed with the necessary powers, and by suitably qualified investigators, competent in matters relating to marine casualties and incidents. This impartial permanent investigative body had been named in Poland: Państwowa Komisja Badania Wypadków Morskich [the State Marine accident Investigation Commission] and began its operation in May 2013 upon the appointment, by the Minister of Transport, Construction and Maritime Economy, of the third one of five statutory members of the Commission. Since the beginning of its activity the Commission has initiated 77 safety investigations, prepared and adopted 272 resolutions, published 53 safety reports and issued more than 30 safety recommendations. The establishment and activity of the Commission leads to greater awareness of casualty causation and has a positive impact on the level of maritime safety.
The article examines a notable tendency toward initiating criminal proceedings and imposing severe penalties for oil spills on ship captains. The tendency takes its origins from the aftermath of 1989 disaster, where a tanker Exxon Valdez run aground and subsequently spilled some 100 000 tons of oil into the Prince William Sound, Alaska. The Exxon Valdez case involved not only civil liability for pollution damage, but also criminal charges. The ship’s captain has been sentenced in 1991. This tendency has been accepted in Europe and now it begins manifest itself on other continents as well. The author puts up arguments in defense of polluting ships' captains and crew.
Standard shipping documents such as bills of lading, charter parties, ship management contracts or cargo declarations are prepared to facilitate international maritime traffic. Their application improves the process of determining the content of various types of contracts, which is important in view of the increasing pace of economic turnover. The Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) plays a leading role in the development of such documents. The shipping documents it creates, as well as individual contractual clauses, are widely used in global shipping. BIMCO's activity, including its contribution to the creation of rules, general terms and standard contracts for international trade, is fundamental, and BIMCO itself can be considered the most important international maritime non-governmental organization in this respect.
The concept of a Ship Management is vaguely known in the Polish law and legal doctrine although the role of the Ship Manager has become quite complex through the years. It started in the eighties when there was a deep change in the shipping market as many shipping companies became bankrupt and mortgagor banks had to turn to ship managers for help.
Thirty years ago in 1988 BIMCO published the first Ship Management Contract which provided the market with a standard document striking a fair balance between the rights and obligations of the owners and the managers, giving some uniformity in the widely used in-house contracts, particularly in the apportionment of liability between parties.
After the implementation of the ISM Code in 1998 and creating the entity called “Company” as a subject responsible for a safe operation of a vessel the ship manager’s role rose extremely. It caused, among other factors, that BIMCO issued the world wide known form of contract named SHIPMAN 98, which was then superseded by its new version issued in 2009.
The main goal of this article is to bring a reader closer to the issue of a Ship Management and the Ship Manager through a Polish translation of this modern BIMCO form named SHIPMAN 2009.
Tonnage tax has been first introduced by Greece in 1957, with similar regimes following in the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, India, South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Spain, Norway, Finland and Ireland. The essence of the scheme is to calculate tax by reference to the net tonnage of the ship operated.
Poland has introduced the Tonnage Tax Act in 2006. However, the Act ins currently under review due to reservations by the European Commission regarding state aid to commercial entities that operate ships.
The comparison of the criminal code in Polish maritime law with that of the British M SA'95 is problematic for several reasons. Firstly, there are far fewer such regulations in the Polish law. Of the five maritime statutes analyzed, only fifteen regulations relate directly to captains. Secondly, the way in which they are regulated is completely different. Polish statutes are often formulated very generally and are wide ranging, while British statutes describe penalties in detail. Legal proceedings in the two systems are also incomparable. According to British law, all proceedings regarding cases of illegal acts must be held in the courts. Illegal acts committed by the captain of a Polish vessel or the foreign captain of a vessel in Polish inner or territorial waters are subject to investigation by the maritime administrative body (director of the Maritime Office). Thus, it is a state administrative body that has jurisdiction in determining guilt and issuing a penalty for a vessel captain according to its own criteria. Of all the maritime regulations, only with regard to regulations based on the Labor Code concerning employment on merchant marine vessels can a vessel captain be held responsible in front of a court of law. Despite the differences presented with regard to illegal acts that vessel captains can commit, there are many analogies and similar regulations in both of these legal systems. They are most similar with regard to international agreements that have been ratified by both countries. A total of fifty criminal acts in the British MSA ’95 were analyzed in this work. The penalties captains face are described in the acts and range from a £500 fine to two years in prison.
This paper presents a short description of about two hundred selected regulations from the broad field of maritime law. For the purpose of simplicity, they were categorized according to current trends in maritime law theory. The author created several groups of acts, the rules of which belong to the same legal branch, i.e., maritime administrative law, maritime civil law, maritime labor law, maritime criminal law, regulations on marine fisheries and the protection of marine resources, international maritime law. The tasks of the American Coastguard, the body responsible for executing maritime law in the USA, are also discussed. For over a century and a half, maritime law only regulated relationships within marine sailing. The vessel, as a transporter of cargo, constituted the central point in this approach, which led maritime law to come to be viewed as a segment of shipping law. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that legislation began to regulate aspects other than sailing. This was in response to the broadening of human activity in the marine environment and led to changes in the understanding of maritime law. However, the advantage of statutory law over common law is clear. An example of this is the total revision of American maritime law in 1983 and the introduction of United States Code Title 46 Shipping to statutory law. It should also be emphasized that these changes left only skeletons of many of the older maritime laws. This should be borne in mind when researching original congressional documents especially since there is no practice of issuing standardizing legislation in the American legal system. American law is comprised of a collection of legislation that is difficult to navigate for those unaccustomed to working with a legal system that originated from common law. The content of this paper, thanks to its original, up-to-date, and reliable information, constitutes a compendium of knowledge regarding the contemporary regulations of the statutoiy maritime law of the USA.