Originally from Arbitration Law of Turkey: Practice and Procedure

CHAPTER 25

MARITIME ARBITRATION IN TURKEY

25.1 THE NATURE OF MARITIME DISPUTES

The international maritime industry stands out as one of the areas in which practitioners have enjoyed frequent resource to arbitration and other ADR devices in a traditional and far reaching character. Historically, a trend has existed for disputes arising out of international maritime transport to be referred to arbitration, ousting the jurisdiction of national courts in favour of internationally minded professional arbitrators. In fact, this bias has increased in recent years due both to the highly complex nature of the maritime industry and also because of the costs and delays involved in referring such complex international disputes to public national courts.

The globalization of commerce has been brought about by astonishing changes in communications and the integrated global and regional markets thus created. Commerce and maritime affairs are universal and timeless activities. The world over, maritime law has always revealed a striking degree of uniformity, which is hardly surprising as shipping is a universal activity with a venerable history almost as long as mankind itself. Turkey has been in the middle of the great commercial centers of Europe, Middle East and Asia for many hundreds of years and looks set to remain so for many years to come with the Bosporus forming a main artery of the world’s shipping industry.

The 20th century has witnessed the development of international harmonization of commercial and maritime law. In the first half of that century, attempts at unification and harmonization of commercial law were dominated by maritime law and its lawyers. The carriage of goods under bills of lading is a good example of this unification development. Attempts at harmonization have spawned important, private and public bodies that were, and remain highly active in the industry. Until the formation of the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Council (IMCO) later to become the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and other United Nations bodies whose activities touch on maritime affairs, the Comité Maritime International (CMI) played the leading role in the development of international conventions and rules concerning maritime law.