1.2 Purpose and delimitation
The purpose of this thesis is to briefly examine the rules governing ship recycling and hereby uncover some of the gaps in the legislature. This is to illustrate the difficulty of regulating this sector and thus identifying where courts may play a large role in ensuring the fulfilment of these regulations, and their underlying purpose, even though they are deemed inapplicable in certain cases. Thus, the aim becomes to map the law through precedent to identify and assess when and if legal liability may be imposed on shipowners or agents hereof, regardless of the gaps in the legislation concerned.
It is important to state that the thesis intends no blame on the parties involved in these cases but merely to objectively identify the law created via the courts and thus let the courts decide what is right and wrong when it comes to ship recycling. There will never be a one-sided story, and while companies may exploit the cheap labour in third-world countries, they are also generating work for the very same people and fostering the reuse of old steel.(1) Ship recycling: reducing human and environmental impacts, above no 5, 3. That said, the choice of using yards with poor labour and environmental standards is not to be condoned. Hopefully, the courts’ willingness to impose liability more often in the area of corporate liability for damage done to people and the environment by the exploitation of the companies’ position in similar cases will lead to a better and more safe ship recycling industry.
Given the limited space, the present thesis will not include an examination of vicarious liability and whether the shipowner could possibly be vicariously liable for the acts and omissions of an operating agent.
Further excluded are the rules on product liability, and thus no examination of whether a shipowner could be liable based on the rules of product liability.
Whether the expansion of liability via case law is the appropriate way to deal with a potentially incomplete legal body is not within the scope of the present thesis, which merely tries to set out the legal sphere of liability drawn by expansion.