AN EXAMINATION OF THE OBLIGATION OF SEA WORTHINESS IN CARRIAGE OF GOODS BY SEA: A CONDITION OR WARRANTY?

The carrier’s duty to provide a seaworthy vessel has received considerable attention, worldwide, from courts, scholars and others in the shipping industry. This attention has resulted in the production of different national laws and international conventions to govern the shipping industry in general and seaworthiness in particular. Every voyage at sea has an antecedent phase, the loading stage. It is established that, during the loading, the vessel must be fit to receive the cargo and to encounter the ordinary perils of the loading stage. In its most fundamental sense, providing a seaworthy vessel requires the vessel being structurally fit for the intended voyage, ‘fit to meet and undergo the perils of sea and other incidental risks to which of necessity she must be exposed in the course of a voyage’. However there is no precise definition of what is seaworthiness, as seaworthiness is not usually defined in modern standard form charter parties. The meaning of the concept has to be ascertained from cases decided at common law. The effect of the breach determines whether it’s a condition or warranty, the court classify seaworthiness as either _ condition or warranty depending on the effect of the breach.. On this note the statement of problem justifying the concern for this paper is that, the lack of precise definition of the subject matter and fluctuation in determining whether it is a condition or warranty that has caused lack of legal certainty, even though some courts describe the duty as the “warranty of seaworthiness”. This is misleading because, a breach of this duty sometimes lead to a repudiation of the contract not onlyentitle the innocent party to damages. Thus, the objective ofthis paper is to espouse the challenges faced by the court inclassifying it as a condition or warranty, some of the things thatcan cause unseaworthiness can be so trivial that they could beremedied quickly without delay, but other causes can be somajor that they cannot be remedied within a reasonable time.This means that the vessel will not be fit for its purposebecause of that, and it is difficult to describe the seaworthinessobligation as either a condition or as a warranty. The paperadopts doctrinal method to arrive at the intended objective.- Therefore, this paper found out that the classification ascondition and warranty is done by the inclination of individualjudges, which creates confusion. In conclusion It isrecommended that it should be classified as an in nominateterm one which means that the result of breaching theobligation will differ from obligations classified as warrantiesor conditions and a test must be established in order to assessthe rights of the cargo-owner in a case where the obligationsare breached.