Not all legislative processes take a long time. The legislative proposal was sent to the House of Representatives on 11 April 2016. On 21 June 2016, the Senate – like the House of Representatives – dealt with the legislative proposal as a formality, and adopted it. The law will take effect at a time to be decided by royal decree.
So what is going to change?
The District Court of Rotterdam will get exclusive jurisdiction to hear shipping cases.
This concerns cases that relate to the transport of goods over water, the exploitation of ships, damage to cargo and collisions. The aim of this concentration is to improve the quality of justice and the efficiency of the judicial process. In practice, this option was already made use of, for example by designating the Rotterdam court as the court having exclusive jurisdiction in commercial contracts. The idea of the legislative proposal is to make better use of the knowledge and expertise of the Rotterdam maritime division, and develop it further as the division handles more cases. The explanatory notes also point out the presence of ship-owners, stevedores, shipbrokers, shipbuilders and specialised law firms. While, in most proceedings, distance is not necessarily an issue, it is obviously convenient for us to only have to cross the Erasmus Bridge for maritime cases, which will definitely make a difference in preliminary relief proceedings in particular. However, the main thing is that this makes it possible to maintain a team of specialised judges in Rotterdam, which means that judges in other courts are no longer burdened with having to read up on complicated legal matter for a single transport case from time to time.
However, the latter will not be a thing of the past just yet. For example, in cases involving combined transport and in preliminary relief proceedings, a party may choose to turn to a different court. Still, the District Court of Rotterdam has been made jointly competent to hear a number of different kinds of cases, which means that there is at least an option of bringing the case before the Rotterdam court.
Consequently, the ‘wet division’ of the District Court of Rotterdam, which is traditionally specialised in civil maritime law as the harbour is located there, expects to hear more international cases. Therefore, it has chosen an easily translatable name (maritime division), and proceedings will – where required – be in English as well. The multi-judge division will handle more cases than before, and English-language summaries will be drawn up of international cases.
All in all, this simple legislative proposal has been a big step in enabling the District Court of Rotterdam to professionalize.
If you have any questions about this subject, you can contact our office 0031 10 209 2777 or by e-mail info@lvh-advocaten.nl.
