The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partially by the Sea (the Rotterdam Rules, signed on 23 September 2009) is intended to make exclusive use of electronic transport documents. Transport documents, as the Author points out, are negotiable.

Drafting of the Convention was set in motion 1996 in the Comite Maritime International (CMI), and from 2002 its development continued under the auspices of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The Author opines that the Rules may advance application of electronic negotia-ble instruments in present day trade.

A debate has been going on for some time within the International Maritime Organization (IMO) concerning necessary legal considerations that would improve the system of international legislation referring to liability for damage connected with the use of shipping vessels. A proposal relating to a general convention on liability for damage caused by vessels was not approved. On 25 November 1999, the Congress of the IMO passed resolution A.898/21/: Guidelines on Shipowners' Responsibilities in Respect ofMaritime Claims. These guidelines have been passed on to member governments and they contain recommendations that those governments should begin to try to persuade maritime ship owners to obtain insurance or another type of financial security in accordance with the principles set out in the guidelines. The guidelines also urge ship owners to obtain insurance cover for their vessels in accordance with the demands of the guidelines, and also to deal with claims relating to any one of their ships. The Legal Committee of the IMO was directed to supervise and review the guidelines, should the need arise.

This is the first article in the Polish literature dedicated to this topie of increasing interest. Currently, the bill of lading is not regarded as a valuable document by the 200 large st loaders. The speed of transport also means that the bill of lading is useless and has been replaced by maritime cargo letters.
The re remain, however, certain areas of trade in which the bill of lading is a necessary document. Therefore, steps have been taken to computerize its issue and trans/ er. It is uncertain if the Hague and Hague-Visby Rules apply to the electronic bills of lading. The Hamburg Rules pennit an electronic signature on bills of lading, provided that this is not in contradiction with the law of the country in which the bill of lading is issued.
In order to ensure that the use of the electronic bill of lading will not be questioned in international trade, it must be clearly stated in an international convention. In 2000, the CMI presented UNCITRAL with a propos al f or a new convention on maritime cargo transport, with the electronic documentation of transport rules, including electronic bills of lading. Work on this convention is in progress.

At the current stage of information technology development there is no need, as yet, to modify Polish norms referring to the maritime transport of cargo. Information technology can be applied without limitation. Therefore, the maritime code modeled on RHV normalizations can remain without alteration and maintain the consistence of solutions in both international and domestic law.

The author discusses in detail the project o f the new convention for cargo transport wholly or in part by sea. The UNCITRAL Working Group for Transport has been dealing with this matter since 2002, and has now finished its work. This paper is the first o f its kind in Polish legal literature. The future convention is to constitute the basis for regulation within the convention of matters connected with transport by various transport branches, for it establishes the extension of its application beyond transport by sea. The convention project has two aims: a. the establishment of a unified regime of liability; and b. the definition of the principles behind the use up to now of one transport document for an entire transport route. From the start it was known that the convention should apply to line transports, because these are marked by inequality in the positions of the parties involved. It may also, exceptionally, have application to tramp shipping in which there is equality of parties.

The concept of control over electronic transferable records is the central premise of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Transferable Electronic Records. It indicates the method of determining the party who has the rights embodied in the negotiable electronic record. The purpose of this article is to present the most important issues related to documents and instruments that have a circular function in international maritime trade, and the intention to create a legal framework for them when they take the form of electronic records.

Bills of Lading are transferable documents of title and the transfer of document results in the transfer of the rights incorporated in it. Some of B/L are additionally negotiable. However the legal meaning of these two terms isn’t the same what is not respected in practice. Historically there is also a difference in legal grounds and scope of rights represented and transferred by negotiable bills of lading according to British, American and continental law. An important role in this differentiation was played by the doctrine of privity of contract. This ultimately affects the legal position and scope of the acquired rights of legitimate holders of bills of lading, which are considered to be “negotiable”, including the right to obtain claims from the carrier for cargo damage.