The dominant international regime for the sea carrier's liability under a bill of lading, with its defenses, its package limit and its one year time bar.
The Hague-Visby Rules are the 1924 Brussels convention as amended by the Visby Protocol of 1968 and by the 1979 protocol that restated its limits in special drawing rights. They impose on the carrier two minimum duties, to exercise due diligence to make the ship seaworthy before and at the beginning of the voyage, and to care properly for the goods during the passage, neither of which may be contracted down. In return, the carrier holds a list of defenses that has generated endless argument, foremost among them nautical fault of the crew and fire without personal fault, a survival from an age when the owner could neither supervise nor reach his ship. Liability is capped per package or per kilogram, whichever formula is more favorable to the claimant, and any action is time barred one year after delivery. The problem solved was the abuse of exemption clauses that carriers imposed on shippers at the end of the nineteenth century, to the point of emptying the bill of lading of its value as security in the eyes of banks.
The 1979 protocol, in force since February 14, 1984, sets the limit at 666.67 special drawing rights per package or 2 per kilogram. In The Maersk Tangier, decided in 2018, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales held that each of the 1,458 pieces of frozen tuna stowed in three containers counted as a package, raising by almost five hundredfold the cap the carrier had invoked.
convention de Bruxelles de 1924, protocole de Visby