Schifffahrt-Transportrecht

The UN Convention on the International Effects of Judicial Sale of Ships (Beijing Convention)

On 7 December 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a convention on the effects of  judicial sale of ships.1 The General Assembly also decided that there should be a signing conference for this convention in Beijing and recommended that this convention should in future bear the name ‘Beijing Convention on the Judicial Sale of Ships’. This signing conference took place in Beijing on 5 September 2023. The following states have already signalled their intention to ratify the Beijing Convention by signing it at the signing conference: China, Comoros, Syria, Senegal, Switzerland, Singapore, Liberia, São Tomé & Príncipe, Honduras, El Salvador, Kiribati, Burkina Faso, Grenada, Sierra Leone and Saudi Arabia.

Purpose of the Convention 
As the name of the Convention indicates, it deals with the international effects of the judicial sale of ships. This becomes immediately clear in Article 1, according to which the Convention regulates the international effects of the judicial sale of a ship by which the purchaser is transferred unencumbered ownership. It is explicitly not dealing with the execution of judicial sale of a ship. This is governed by the law of the state in which the judicial sale takes place (see Article 4(1)). The term ‘judicial sale’ is not limited to a public auction in the sense of a forced sale but also includes, according to Article 2(a)(i), the sale by way of a private contract under the supervision and with the authorisation of a court.2 In both cases the proceeds of the sale must be paid to the creditors (Article 2(a)(ii)).

The central provision on the objective of an internationally accepted effect of forced proliferation is Article 6: ‘A judicial sale for which a certificate of judicial sale referred to in Article 5 has been issued shall have the effect in every other State Party of conferring clean title to the ship on the purchase.’ The core aim is to ensure that ships realised by way of judicial sale can be operated without restriction for the purchaser without being encumbered by old claims or maritime liens that existed at the time of the judicial sale. Old claims or maritime liens should not be allowed to further impair the ship’s operation as a result of the judicial sale of the ship. The purchaser should obtain unencumbered ownership of the ship, a so-called ‘clean title’. However, the Convention does not regulate the conditions under which unencumbered acquisition takes place. This is subject to the law of the state in which the judicial sale takes place.

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