The "flag of convenience" rules have both public and private laws?

Question

All ships owned by DWI are flagged in the Bahamas and Liberia. The "flag of convenience" rules have both public law and private law implications. Private law comes into play in the employer-employee, passenger contract, and cargo contract obligations of the ship. Public law also interfaces with these rules in that the ships and companies pick and choose flags of convenience for individual ships based upon liability concerns such as negligence, contractual, labor, customs, immigration, and/or environmental laws.

Now with this problem DOES THE LAW APPLY FROM WHERE THE SHIP DOCK AND LEAVE OR DOES THE LAW APPLY FROM WHERE THE SHIP WAS LICENSED? Even in Open free waters does the ships mainland law from where it took off apply?

Answer 1

Numerous venues and jurisdictions apply.

Let's consider, for example, the employer/employee relationship. We may have a company registered in the Bahamas that owns a ship that is registered in Liberia. The ship is then bareboat chartered to a company registered in Greece. That company then hires an operating company registered in London to man and operate the vessel. They hire a Filipino crew, through a Manila registered maning agency, that fly out to board the vessel in California.

The crews relationship with the manning agency is a contractual one, that is going to be regulated by Filipino law. Their employer, however, is a British company - the operator. His contract with them will be governed, under Admiralty law principles, by the laws of Liberia. However, since the ship is currently in the US, there are US law implications too.

The US is a signatory to various international agreements on seafarer employment, some of which Liberia is not a party to. The US, for example, is a signatory to the ILF minimum wage agreements. Even if the crew had agreed to work for less than ILF minimum, that agreement would be illegal under US law, and the US could detain the ship until back pay was made. Under Filipino law, though, the manning agency could the sue the crewmen in the Phillipines to recove the additional pay they were forced to cough up to get the ship out of the US.

It's a VERY tangled web..... which is why most lawyers tend to think of Admiralty Law practitioners as being somewhat of a different breed :-)

Richard