An Appraisal of the Need of Ethiopia to Adopt the Rotterdam Rules

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the ¿Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Wholly or Partly by Seä to extends and modernizes existing international rules regarding the contract of maritime carriage of goods and introduces multimodal transportation. The aim is for the Convention to replace the Hague, the Hague-Visby, and the Hamburg Rules and to achieve uniformity of law in the field of carriage of goods by sea. The compelling reason to prepare a new regime is that the Hague, the Hague-Visby, and the Hamburg Rules are outdated and unable to cope up with the latest developments and do not take into account the door-to-door service application, do not incorporate electronic commerce, as well as lack a universal system. It is helpful to maritime law students to analyze the existing carriage of goods by sea regime with the new regime.