ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the ship arrest conventions — the highly popular pact of 19522 and the less widely adopted but actually rather similar one of 1999. There is no doubt that the 1952 Convention solved many problems and removed a good deal of the guesswork and uncertainty from arrest. There remain at least three issues not covered by either Convention and not seriously discussed at the time, but which are of considerable potential importance today. These are: the security function of an arrest; the geographical reach of arrest orders; and the effect of international insolvency law on arrest. The history of the carriage conventions is a case in point: the result of well-meaning efforts to improve the original Hague Rules regime by producing replacement conventions, each supposedly better than the last, is that we now have a confusion of conventions and other regimes, often inconsistent with each other, good for few other than forum-shoppers and lawyers.
