An Overview of the Discipline Applicable to the Transport Performed by Successive Carriers

The Convention relative au contrat de transport international de marchandises par route (known as C.M.R., signed in Geneva on 19th May 1956), in its Chap-ter VI regulates the factispecies in which a transportation, even if governed by a single contract, is performed by successive road carriers. Since this is quite common in practice, both in the road transport sector and in one involving several different transport modes, it would be very useful to standardize the regulations. This paper carries out a comparative-contrastive analysis between the provisions of articles 34 - 40 of the C.M.R. and art. 1700 of the Italian Civil Code, the latter related to the so called “trasporto cumulativo”, which can be as-similated to the figure of carriage performed by successive carriers. Both C.M.R. and Italian Civil Code provisions have much in common and seem to provide a substantially similar discipline to the factispecies. Never-theless, they diverge significantly on an essential point. The C.M.R. states that Chapter VI applies only in the event that successive carriers are all road carriers: if carriage includes non-road routes, in the absence of a standard reg-ulation, national rules on multimodal transport or the discipline on trasport su-perposé should be applied. On the contrary, the Italian national legislation makes no such distinction, therefore art. 1700 of the Civil Code applies in cases of successive carriers that operate using modes of transport other than road transport. The different approach of the two regulatory systems leads to signifi-cant consequences in terms of the applicable discipline – especially with re-gard to the liability of carriers, the interruption of the prescription and the de-termination of the delay – to cases of successive carriers who use different modes of transport to complete a single contract of international carriage. Finally, the paper, in order to give a more complete framework of all the issues involved, focuses on the distinction between the factispecies in anal-ysis and those cases where the contracting carrier hires subcontractors or acts as a freight forwarder for the completion of certain segments of the carriage.