The 'Hamburg Rules': Articles 1 to 5.1

The "United Nations Convention on Carriage of Goods by Sea, 1978", referred to as the "Hamburg Rules", will enter into force between the Contracting States on the 1st November 1992.;This thesis examines the first five articles of the Convention and principally intends to depict their working in a structured and clear manner. It further reveals that their drafters primarily aimed: (1) at adjusting the distribution of the risks of sea-carriage between carrier and cargo-interest, which prevails under the "Hague Rules", to its contemporary legal and factual environment and (2) at promoting uniformity and certainty in the application of the Convention, as compared to the "Hague Rules".;The Convention indeed significantly, as compared to these "Hague Rules", strengthens the fault-based liability of the carrier and expands the documentary, geographic and temporal scope of application of the mandatory regime that both of these conventions contain.