The Beijing Convention on the Judicial Sale of Ships

Abstract

The Beijing Convention on the Judicial Sale of Ships (‘Convention’) was recently signed by 15 States in a signing ceremony on 5 September 2023. Broadly speaking, the Convention provides a regime for giving consistent international effect to the judicial sale of ships, but retains the ability of state domestic law to prescribe the procedure for judicial sales and the circumstances in which a judicial sale confers clean title to a vessel. This article seeks to explain the issues that arose from inconsistent rules regarding the judicial sale of vessels, explain how the Convention attempts to deal with such issues, and explain how the Convention compares to Australian domestic law regarding the judicial sale of vessels.