Port, Maritime and Transport Law between Legacies of the Past and Modernization

The development of the Maritime Law and Transport Law sector is strongly interconnected with Ports. Indeed, they have always had a central role in the world’s maritime trade, and in the last years they have to face new commercial and economic challenges to reach and maintain ever higher standards of growth and levels of competitiveness. At the same time, ports shall be able to deal with social and economic trends such as the widespread relocation of industrial and manufacturing ac-tivities towards developing countries, the low-cost production and the rele-vant traffic flows for imports of raw materials and exports of finished prod-ucts. The complexity of the matter is also due to the different subjects and new players involved. The Chinese presence in the Mediterranean Sea has be-come decisive and Chinese shipping and logistics companies are gaining a key role in the routes connecting China to Europe, along the so-called “21st Cen-tury Maritime Silk Road”. In this context, both the European Union and each Member State are trying to improve the competitiveness of ports, to facilitate the growth of the traffic of goods and passengers and to promote the intermodality, through the strengthening of partnerships. A development in this sense would guarantee positive repercussions in the field of port and logistics. This port system shall represent the centre of a strategic junction be-tween Member States and the new players, opening up opportunities in the transport, energy and telecommunications sector, as well as in cross-cutting business areas. Keeping in mind these goals in port and maritime field, EU is imple-menting actions, regulations and administrative policies according to the rele-vant international instruments. In light of that, European ports will be able to act not only as a transhipment centre or as a facility serving industrial plants, but also as a logistics platform linked directly with production and transport chains. These “platforms” will be part of a wider logistics project affecting the whole Europe, which will have a great influence on national and Europe-an integration with the global market. Indeed, it is worth noting that the Port reality collects not only a huge number of traffics, goods, vehicles of various types, but many entities as well, involved in the management of activities concerning both public and private issues. Therefore, it is increasingly necessary to equip the ports with state-of-the-art security and logistics systems and with new technologies in compli-ance with international, EU and national regulations. This volume collects a number of papers, by which the Scholars of var-ious countries have contributed to deepen some of the most current multidis-ciplinary aspects and issues that affect the multiple sectors of the maritime, transport and logistics market. The strength of this work is in the effort to en-courage an intense debate on several crucial issues pertaining to public and private aspects of Navigation Law, Transport Law, International Trade Law and logistics, directly or only to some extent linked to ports. In this perspective, the volume focuses on a wide spectrum of subjects, such as, among others: the fair and non-discriminatory access to port infra-structures, the relevance of Port State Control, the governance of ports, the administrative and competition rules related to the issuance and/or the re-newal of public concessions for State-owned maritime areas and quays, the impact of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR) on port operators, the simpli-fication of customs-related operations, the implementation of the Interna-tional Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS Code) instruments, the pub-lic debate as an instrument for preventing conflicts which can arise before and during the realization of the major port infrastructures, the development of port special economic zones, the internalisation of China’s port system, the employment of private armed guards on ships, the legal challenges of un-manned ships in the maritime contracting, the role of the marine carrier in in-ternational sale contract, the use of electronic bill of lading, the delivery in the transport performed by the logistics operator, the cold chain and the im-provement of the traceability systems in the transport of perishable food-stuffs, and the transport of passengers.