Seaports in International Law

Description

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive overview of modern seaports from a legal perspective. Further, it provides a basic toolkit for establishing a legal doctrine of seaports, the instruments of said toolkit being the very few legal norms specifically targeting seaports, which are examined as such rather than through the lens of other, more established disciplines, such as the law of the sea or transportation law. It is a first, necessary step toward giving seaports the status they rightfully deserve in legal studies. Despite centuries of international law studies and decades of EU law evolution, seaports have remained stuck in limbo. From a law of the sea perspective, seaports belong to the land, an approach that is often clearly reflected in national maritime legislation. The other branches of international law do not focus on seaports, since they are considered to belong to the sea. The port communities, for their part, have availed themselves of the “port specificity” concept. In recent decades, containerization has transformed ports into key hubs of the globalized economy, but also into vital checkpoints of the War on Terror, due to the security risks posed by the millions of sealed containers circulating worldwide. Moreover, tragic maritime incidents have shown that seaports are the only reliable sentinels of the seas, being the only places where the systematic inspection of ships is feasible. This has led to the adoption of specific international and EU rules. Those rules, however, remain fragmented, highly specialized and technical; as such, they are unsuitable for creating an organic legal seaport regime: this objective can only be achieved with a significant contribution from legal doctrine. Front Matter....Pages i-vi Front Matter....Pages 1-1 The Lack of Interest for Seaports in the International Law and Doctrine....Pages 3-7 The Port and the International Law in General: A Land Appendix....Pages 9-14 The Port and the Law of the Sea: An Accessory to the Waters....Pages 15-18 Front Matter....Pages 19-19 Paolo Sarpi’s Legal Doctrine....Pages 21-22 The Colonial Factories....Pages 23-27 Front Matter....Pages 29-29 The Longshoremen’s Organizations....Pages 31-32 The 1923 Geneva Convention on Seaports....Pages 33-35 The Forgotten Ports and Port Installations: Lotus Case, Wimbledon Case, Suez Crisis....Pages 37-41 When You are Forced to Remember the Port: The Laws of Wars from the Hague Conventions to the Cuban Crisis....Pages 43-47 The Mar del Plata Convention....Pages 49-51 The Montego Bay Convention....Pages 53-59 Front Matter....Pages 61-61 An Unprecedented Economic Significance and the Ascendance of the Multinational Terminal Operators....Pages 63-66 The Decline of the Longshoremen’s Organizations and Their Resistance in Europe....Pages 67-71 Flags of Convenience and Port State Control....Pages 73-82 Port Security: The Dubai Ports World Case and the ISPS Code....Pages 83-88 From the Traditional to the Multimodal Seaport: The Right to Access....Pages 89-93 Seaports in International Commercial Law....Pages 95-99 Front Matter....Pages 101-101 Common Features in the International Regulation of Seaports....Pages 103-106 A Contribution from Private International Law and Some Municipal Legal Orders....Pages 107-109 Starting from a Unitary Notion of Port....Pages 111-114