Welcome
This website provides information about The CMI Lex Maritima 2025 – The Tokyo Principles of Maritime Law, the first-ever compilation of the globally shared principles of maritime law.
The Comité Maritime International (CMI), the world umbrella organisation for practitioners of maritime law, has approved the text.
The CMI Lex Maritima can be regarded as a codification or restatement of the lex mercatoria for maritime matters.
This website is an initiative of Professor Eric Van Hooydonk, the initiator and draftsman of The CMI Lex Maritima, as well as the chairman of the CMI International Working Group responsible for the project.
This website aims to disseminate as widely as possible all academic and other developments regarding The CMI Lex Maritima and to provide information on future updates.
Anyone who has news or comments is kindly invited to share them. This would be greatly appreciated.
The contact details are available here.
Unification of maritime law from 1885 to 2025
The engraving above depicts the inauguration of the renovated Scheldt quays in Antwerp on 26 July 1885. Shortly afterwards, from 28 September to 3 October 1885, the Belgian government organised the first international congress on commercial law in the same city, where an attempt was made to agree on a world maritime law. This plan failed, and so did a follow-up conference in Brussels in 1888. However, these initial explorations and the widespread cosmopolitan optimism of the Belle Époque that inspired them did lead to the establishment of the CMI in 1897, also on the initiative of the Belgians, more specifically the legendary founding fathers Louis Franck, Auguste Beernaert and Charles Le Jeune. The CMI produced an impressive number of international conventions for the unification of maritime law and is still based in Antwerp. This body has now been supplemented with an innovative soft law instrument, which does not attempt to bring uniformity to what differs, but rather highlights what is already uniform today.
