One year time bar in carriage of goods by sea

The Hague-Visby Rules confine any action against the sea carrier to one year from delivery or from the date the goods should have been delivered, a period the parties may extend by agreement but which no court will relax in a claimant's favor. It is not an ordinary limitation period: English case law treats it as extinguishing the right itself, which bars reliance on it even by way of defense or set-off once the year has run. It bears first on the cargo underwriter, who pays its assured and then proceeds by subrogation against the carrier, inheriting a period already largely consumed by handling the file. The other carriage regimes do not align, the Montreal Convention and the Hamburg Rules allowing two years and the CMR one year extended to three for willful misconduct, so that a single multimodal shipment can become time barred on three different dates. The problem solved is the preservation of evidence, since a ship keeps neither its crew nor its papers indefinitely.

In Aries Tanker Corporation v Total Transport, known as The Aries, the House of Lords held in 1977 that expiry of the one year period extinguishes the claim itself: the charterer, relying on a cargo shortage, could not even set it off against the owner's freight claim, and had to pay the freight in full.

forclusion annale, délai d'action contre le transporteur maritime