Maritime Lien and Ship Arrest

A maritime lien is a privileged charge that attaches to a ship, and sometimes to freight or bunkers, by operation of law in respect of a defined set of claims arising from the ship’s operation. It differs from almost every other security interest in commercial law: it depends on neither possession of the asset, nor registration in any public register, nor the consent of the shipowner. It attaches the instant the claim arises, it travels with the vessel, and a buyer who pays value for the ship without notice still takes her subject to liens that already bit. The lien is enforced by an admiralty action in rem against the vessel herself, treated as a defendant for procedural purposes, and the ship can be arrested as security until she is released against alternative security or sold by judicial sale.

Ship arrest is the procedural counterpart to the substantive lien. It is how a claimant brings a vessel within the jurisdiction of an admiralty court, forces the owner or its insurers to put up security, and, if the claim is proven, obtains a court-ordered sale whose proceeds are distributed in order of priority. The arrest power is among the oldest features of admiralty practice, and it exists in some form in every major maritime jurisdiction. The categories of claim that justify arrest, the procedural steps, and the rules on counter-security and wrongful arrest differ sharply between the common-law and civil-law traditions, which is why the same fleet can face very different exposure in Rotterdam, London, Singapore, and Durban.

This article sets out the maritime lien as a proprietary right and its four classical features, the closed list of true liens and the wider statutory rights of action in rem, the civil-law tradition and the unratified liens conventions, ranking and priority, the United States necessaries lien under CIMLA and the choice-of-law problem it creates, the in rem and in personam actions, the mechanics of arrest and release, the Brussels 1952 and Geneva 1999 Arrest Conventions, sister-ship and associated-ship arrest, wrongful arrest, and judicial sale with clean title under the 2022 Beijing Convention. It closes with a jurisdictional comparison and a note on limits.

The maritime lien as a proprietary right

A maritime lien in the strict sense is a substantive proprietary right, not a procedural device and not something created by judgment. It attaches at the moment the underlying claim arises, and the later court proceeding merely enforces a right that already exists. English admiralty jurisprudence, followed across most of the common-law world, identifies four classical features, and each of them matters in practice.

First, the lien is a privileged claim: it confers priority over other creditors in the distribution of the ship or her sale proceeds, ahead even of the registered mortgage in the case of the classical liens. Second, it attaches secretly, without registration in any public book and without notice to anyone, so a lien can burden a ship that appears, on the register, to be unencumbered. Third, it travels with the vessel: it is not defeated by a sale, so a bona fide purchaser for value without notice takes the ship cum onere, subject to the lien. Fourth, it is inchoate until it is enforced by an action in rem, at which point the court’s process crystallizes the right against the res.

The secrecy and the survival on sale are the features that make the lien commercially dangerous and legally distinctive. A buyer of a secondhand ship cannot discover every lien by searching a register, because the classical liens leave no trace there; a wages lien or a collision lien can surface months after the sale and be enforced against the buyer’s ship. This is one reason a judicial sale, which extinguishes prior liens and confers clean title, commands a better price than a private sale of the same tonnage.

The closed list of true maritime liens

The number of claims that generate a true maritime lien is small, and common-law admiralty keeps the list closed rather than open. Five categories are classical: damage done by a ship, principally collision but any tort where the ship is the instrument of harm; salvage; seamen’s wages; the master’s wages and disbursements; and bottomry and respondentia. Bottomry, a loan on the security of the ship, and respondentia, a loan on the security of the cargo, are effectively obsolete, killed off by modern communications and marine insurance, but they remain on the list as a matter of doctrine.

The closed character of the list is a deliberate limit on the lien’s reach. Courts have declined to add new categories, so a claim that does not fall within the recognized heads is not a maritime lien however meritorious it is, and can support arrest only if a statute makes it a right of action in rem. The rationale is that the secret, survive-on-sale lien is a strong remedy that ought not to multiply, because every new lien erodes the security of the mortgagee who financed the ship and the certainty of the buyer who acquires her.

The damage lien attaches to the offending vessel as a procedural personification: in the old formula the ship herself “did” the damage and answers for it in rem. It bites at the moment of the collision, not at judgment, which is why a colliding ship that is sold before the claim is pursued remains subject to the lien in the buyer’s hands. The wages lien secures not only basic pay but overtime, leave pay, repatriation, contractual bonuses, and social-insurance contributions, and it ranks at the very top of the substantive order for reasons of policy discussed below.

Statutory rights of action in rem

Beyond the closed list of true liens sits a wider category of statutory rights of action in rem, sometimes loosely called statutory liens, which permit arrest of the vessel for a longer schedule of claims: supply of necessaries, port and canal dues, agency fees, stevedoring, container leasing, charterparty hire and damages, cargo claims, towage, and bunkers. In England these rights come from the Senior Courts Act 1981, section 20 read with section 21, and their reach is narrower than a true lien in the one respect that matters most on an insolvency.

A statutory right of action in rem does not survive a genuine change of ownership. It can be exercised, and the ship arrested, only if the person who would be liable in personam was the beneficial owner or demise charterer of the ship when the claim arose and remains the beneficial owner (or demise charterer) when the in rem proceedings are commenced. Sell the ship to an unconnected buyer in between, and the statutory right evaporates, because it never attached to the ship as property in the way a true lien does. This is the practical fault line between the two categories.

The distinction governs both survival and ranking. A salvor or an unpaid crew can enforce against the ship after she has been sold; an English bunker supplier or necessaries man cannot, because a sale defeats the statutory right. The same supply of bunkers can therefore give a true maritime lien in one country and a mere statutory right in another, which is why the forum of arrest can decide the outcome of an otherwise identical claim.

The civil-law tradition and the liens conventions

Civil-law jurisdictions following the French and continental tradition do not use the common-law closed list. They tend to recognize a defined but longer schedule of privileged claims, the “privilèges maritimes”, set by code or by reference to the maritime liens and mortgages conventions, and they use a protective seizure, the saisie conservatoire, rather than the in rem action. The privileged claims typically rank above the registered mortgage and are set out with more statutory precision than the common law’s judge-made heads.

Three attempts have been made to unify the law of maritime liens and mortgages, and their history explains why national law still governs the field. The 1926 Brussels convention was the first; the 1967 convention was an attempt to improve it and failed to attract ratifications; and the International Convention on Maritime Liens and Mortgages was adopted at Geneva on 6 May 1993 and entered into force on 5 September 2004, six months after the tenth state consented to be bound. The 1993 convention deliberately narrowed the list of liens that outrank a registered mortgage, because its purpose was to improve the security of ship finance and encourage the growth of national fleets.

The 1993 convention recognizes a maritime lien for claims for crew wages, for loss of life or personal injury connected with the ship’s operation, for salvage, for port, canal, and pilotage dues, and for tort claims for physical loss or damage caused by the ship’s operation, but it excludes necessaries from the lien category, leaving them to national law and to the local arrest regime. Its practical importance is limited by its narrow ratification: with fewer than twenty parties, and neither England nor the United States among them, the 1993 convention has not displaced national law in the major arrest centers, and a practitioner still starts from the local statute rather than the treaty.

Ranking and priority

The order in which competing claims are paid out of a limited fund, the arrested ship or her sale proceeds, is fixed by a mix of statute, convention, and judge-made rule, and it varies by jurisdiction. A general common-law ordering, with local variation, runs roughly as follows.

1. The costs of the arresting court and the Marshal in arresting, preserving, and selling the ship. These come off the top, before any claimant takes anything, because without them there is no fund to distribute.
2. Crew wages, including the master’s wages and accrued benefits, which hold the highest substantive rank in almost every jurisdiction.
3. Salvage liens, which rank ahead of the mortgage and of most other claims because the salvor preserved the asset; where there are several, they rank in inverse order of time.
4. Damage liens, principally collision, which in England and much of the Commonwealth rank ahead of the mortgage but below wages and salvage.
5. The registered ship mortgage, the primary financing security taken by ship-finance banks under the law of the flag.
6. Statutory rights of action in rem and other contractual maritime claims: necessaries, charterparty hire and damages, cargo claims under a bill of lading , towage and pilotage where not themselves liens, agency disbursements, and container demurrage.

Cargo interests sit inside this order in more than one place. A cargo claim against the carrying ship for loss of or damage to goods is, in England, a statutory right of action in rem rather than a true lien, so it supports arrest but ranks with the general body of contractual maritime claims and is defeated by a sale before proceedings begin. A separate strand runs the other way: where the ship and cargo have been saved by a general average sacrifice or expenditure, the shipowner’s claim for the cargo’s contribution is secured by a possessory lien on the goods, and the adjustment is governed by the general average and York-Antwerp Rules machinery rather than by the ranking of ship liens. The two systems, the ship fund and the cargo contribution, run in parallel and a distribution can engage both at once.

Two features of this order are worth stressing because they surprise commercial parties. The classical liens outrank the registered mortgage, so a bank that financed the ship and registered its security first can still be subordinated to a later wages or salvage claim that leaves no trace on the register. And the inverse-order rule for salvage reverses the usual first-in-time priority, on the reasoning that the latest salvor is the one who preserved the fund for the earlier claimants and the mortgagee alike. Where a shipowner has also constituted a limitation fund, the interaction with the LLMC limitation of maritime claims regime can alter what a claimant actually recovers from the ship.

The United States necessaries lien and the choice-of-law problem

The single most consequential divergence in the ranking analysis comes from United States law. Under the Commercial Instruments and Maritime Liens Act, codified at 46 U.S.C. 31301 and following, a person who provides necessaries to a vessel on the order of the owner or a person authorized by the owner has a true maritime lien on the ship, may bring a civil action in rem to enforce it, and need not allege or prove that credit was given to the vessel (46 U.S.C. 31342). Section 31341 lists the persons presumed to have authority to procure necessaries: the owner, the master, a person entrusted with management at the port of supply, and an officer or agent appointed by the owner, a charterer, an owner pro hac vice, or a buyer in possession. “Necessaries” is defined broadly to include repairs, supplies, towage, and the use of a dry dock or marine railway.

The effect is to turn a claim that would be a mere statutory right in England into a true lien that survives a sale and outranks later interests, which makes the United States a forum of choice for unpaid bunker and supply claims. The OW Bunker collapse of November 2014 turned this into years of litigation: with the contractual supplier insolvent, physical suppliers and the OW chain both asserted liens against receiving vessels, and courts had to decide which of them, if either, held the CIMLA lien and could enforce in rem while the ship’s owner faced the risk of paying twice.

Because a United States necessaries claim is a true lien and an English one is not, arresting the same ship in different countries can produce different outcomes, and the conflict of laws becomes decisive. The leading authority is The Halcyon Isle [1981] AC 221, where a British ship carrying an English mortgage was repaired in New York without payment and then arrested by the mortgagee in Singapore. The sale proceeds could not satisfy everyone, and the question was whether the American repairers’ lien or the English mortgage took priority. The Privy Council majority, led by Lord Diplock, held that a maritime lien is a matter of procedure governed by the lex fori, so a Singapore court recognizes a foreign lien only where Singapore law would itself grant one; the repairers therefore lost to the mortgage. Lords Salmon and Scarman dissented, treating the American lien as a substantive property right that traveled with the ship and should be recognized. The split has never been resolved cleanly, and courts in Canada and Australia have taken the substantive view in the line running from The Ioannis Daskalelis, so where a supplier can arrest is often worth more than the strength of the claim itself.

Crew wages and the super-priority

Seamen’s wages hold the highest practical priority in admiralty, and the reasons are rooted in policy rather than in the size or timing of the claim. The traditional rationale is that the seafarer is the favored creditor of the law: the calling is hazardous, the claimant is often far from home and poorly placed to pursue an owner once the ship has sailed, and there is a social interest in ensuring crews are paid so they are not stranded abroad. Admiralty courts reinforce the wages lien procedurally, granting priority applications to sell where unpaid crew remain aboard a laid-up or arrested ship.

The MLC 2006 framework strengthened this protection. The 2014 amendments to the Maritime Labour Convention, in force since 18 January 2017, require shipowners to carry financial security against abandonment covering outstanding wages and other entitlements up to four months, plus repatriation and reasonable expenses. The ISM Code obligations of the company and its Designated Person Ashore sit alongside these duties, because an abandonment scenario engages both the wage lien and the safety-management system. The wage lien is often the only effective remedy for a crew abandoned by an insolvent owner, and it remains ahead of the mortgage precisely so that the bank’s security cannot swallow the fund before the crew is paid.

The action in rem and in personam

In common-law admiralty, the action in rem is the procedural engine that enforces a maritime lien or a statutory right of action in rem. The claim form is issued against the vessel by name, the ship is the defendant, and she is served while within the jurisdiction and taken into the custody of the Admiralty Marshal or sheriff. Once arrested she cannot leave without leave of the court, and she stands as the security for the claim. The companion action in personam is brought against the owner or other person liable, and many systems allow both to run on the same facts.

The relationship between the two actions changes once the owner responds. When the owner acknowledges service and enters a defense to the in rem claim, the proceeding functions much like an in personam action: judgment can be enforced against the owner’s assets generally, while the arrested ship, or the security substituted for her, continues to back the claim up to her value. This gives the in rem claimant a practical advantage over an ordinary creditor, because it holds tangible security from the outset rather than a bare judgment to enforce later.

Civil-law systems reach a similar commercial result by a different route. Rather than personify the ship, they use the saisie conservatoire, a protective attachment of the vessel as the debtor’s property to secure a claim that will be litigated on the merits, often in another forum. The ship is treated as an asset against which security is asserted, not as a juridical defendant, and the seizure is typically easier to obtain and easier to challenge than a common-law arrest. In both traditions the arrest is usually sought without notice, because the whole point is to catch the ship before she sails.

Ship arrest procedure step by step

The mechanics vary by jurisdiction, but the common-law arrest follows a recognizable sequence. The claimant first satisfies itself that the claim falls within a category that supports arrest, a true maritime lien or a statutory right of action in rem, and that the target ship is, or soon will be, within the jurisdiction. Timing is everything, because the ship may be in port for hours, and the papers are often prepared in advance against an expected call.

The claimant issues an in rem claim form naming the vessel, then applies for a warrant of arrest supported by evidence, on affidavit or witness statement, that establishes a qualifying claim, identifies the ship, and states her presence. In England the application is made to the Admiralty Registry and, in the usual case, without notice to the owner. Some jurisdictions require an undertaking in damages or security for the Marshal’s expenses; England does not require the claimant to give a cross-undertaking in damages as a condition of arrest, which is one reason the English threshold for wrongful-arrest damages is so high.

The Admiralty Marshal executes the warrant, taking the ship into custody, and the vessel then accrues custody costs, port dues, and crew maintenance that rank as Marshal’s expenses ahead of the claims. The owner, facing a ship that earns nothing under arrest and risks losing charters, moves quickly to provide security and obtain release. If no security is provided and the claim is proven, the court orders an appraisement and sale, and the Marshal sells the ship, converting her into a fund for distribution. The classification society record and the ship’s flag state register are consulted through the process, since deregistration and clean title turn on them at the sale.

The Brussels 1952 and Geneva 1999 Arrest Conventions

The International Convention Relating to the Arrest of Sea-going Ships, signed at Brussels on 10 May 1952 and in force since 24 February 1956, is the principal international instrument on ship arrest. It has been given effect by the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and many Commonwealth and Latin American states; the United States is not a party. Its central technique is a closed list of “maritime claims” in Article 1, seventeen categories lettered (a) to (q), and arrest is permitted only for a claim within that list.

The Article 1 list covers damage caused by any ship, loss of life or personal injury, salvage, agreements for the use or hire of a ship, agreements for the carriage of goods, loss of or damage to goods, general average, towage, pilotage, supplies of goods or materials wherever supplied, construction, repair or equipment of a ship and dock charges, master’s and crew wages, master’s disbursements, and disputes over title, ownership, or a mortgage of a ship. Article 2 confines arrest under the convention to ships flying the flag of a contracting state, and Article 3 introduces the sister-ship rule, allowing arrest of another ship in the same ownership, except for the ownership and mortgage claims at (o), (p), and (q). A ship may not be arrested more than once for the same claim by the same claimant.

The International Convention on Arrest of Ships was adopted at Geneva on 12 March 1999 at a joint United Nations and IMO diplomatic conference and entered into force on 14 September 2011, six months after Albania became the tenth state to ratify. It updates the 1952 regime: it expands the list to twenty-two maritime claims, adding damage or threat of damage to the environment, wreck removal, insurance premiums, and commissions or brokerage, while dropping bottomry, and it allows arrest regardless of the ship’s flag. Take-up has been thin, with roughly a score of states party and neither the United Kingdom nor the United States among them, so the working international framework remains the 1952 convention reinforced by national legislation. One reason cited for the slow uptake is the 1999 convention’s more claimant-adverse stance on wrongful arrest, which exposes arresting parties to broader liability.

Sister-ship and associated-ship arrest

Sister-ship arrest answers a structural feature of the industry. Owners routinely hold each ship in a separate single-ship company, so that the vessel that incurred the claim may have been sold, scrapped, or placed beyond reach by the time the claim is pursued, and the offending ship’s company may have no other assets. Article 3 of the 1952 convention lets the claimant arrest another ship in the same registered ownership as the offending vessel at the time the claim arose, which pierces the timing problem but not the corporate one.

The limit of sister-ship arrest is that it requires identity of registered ownership. It does not reach a ship owned by a different company, even one in the same group under common control, so an owner who puts every ship in its own company and never lets two ships share a registered owner can defeat it. This is exactly the structure the single-ship company is built to create, which is why claimants look for a jurisdiction that reaches further.

South Africa provides that reach. Under sections 3(6) and 3(7) of the Admiralty Jurisdiction Regulation Act 105 of 1983, a claimant may arrest an “associated ship”, a ship owned or controlled, when the action begins, by the person who owned or controlled the offending ship when the claim arose. Because the test is common control, not merely common ownership, and because a charterer can be deemed the owner for the purpose, the associated-ship regime looks through single-ship companies to the commercial reality of the fleet. South Africa is not party to either arrest convention and its courts apply the doctrine purposively to defeat ownership-hiding structures. No other state has copied it in full, and England, Singapore, and the wider Commonwealth continue to require strict identity of registered ownership, which keeps South Africa an attractive forum despite the logistics of arresting a ship off its coast.

Release against security

Once a ship is arrested the owner has every commercial incentive to secure her release, because a vessel under arrest earns no hire, may lose scheduled fixtures, and accrues port dues, crew wages, and custody costs. Release is obtained by providing security acceptable to the claimant or the court, in an amount that usually covers the claimant’s best arguable case on the merits plus interest at a commercial rate to the likely date of judgment plus costs. Courts will increase security where the claimant shows a good arguable case for a larger sum and reduce it where the demand was excessive.

Three forms of security are used, in ascending order of commercial convenience. Payment of cash into court is the most secure for the claimant and the most expensive for the owner, because it ties up working capital. A first-class bank guarantee, typically from a London or Singapore branch of a major bank on wording acceptable to the claimant, is more common. Most common of all is a Protection and Indemnity club Letter of Undertaking, a written promise from one of the International Group P&I clubs to pay any sum found due up to a stated cap in exchange for release.

The P&I letter of undertaking works because the clubs are well capitalized, the wording is familiar to admiralty practitioners, and the clubs have a long record of paying without forcing the claimant to enforce. A claimant that accepts a first-class club letter avoids the cost and delay of a bank guarantee while keeping security that is, in practice, as good as cash. The letter is not a bank instrument and carries no bank charges, but a claimant is entitled to insist on a bank guarantee or cash if it doubts the club or the wording, and the choice between the three is itself a point of negotiation on release.

Wrongful arrest

The risk of wrongful arrest is one of the main constraints on the arrest power, because an arrest that turns out to be unjustified can cause large losses: lost hire, missed fixtures, port costs, and reputational harm. Whether the owner can recover those losses depends on the jurisdiction, and the common-law and civil-law traditions diverge sharply.

In England the test comes from The Evangelismos (1858) 12 Moo PC 352, a Privy Council decision arising from the arrest of a ship wrongly identified as the vessel that had collided with the Hind in the Thames. Damages for wrongful arrest are recoverable only where the arrest was made with mala fides, bad faith, or with crassa negligentia, gross negligence so serious that it implies malice. A merely mistaken or even unreasonable belief is not enough, and the failure of the underlying claim does not by itself make the arrest wrongful. The Court of Appeal reaffirmed the test in the Alkyon litigation, Stallion Eight Shipping Ltd v Natixis SA, even while accepting that its original rationale no longer holds, and Singapore adopted the same standard in The Kiku Pacific [1999] 2 SLR 595. The threshold is high because arrest is treated as a right exercised without judicial discretion and, in England, without a cross-undertaking in damages.

Civil-law jurisdictions tend to apply lower thresholds and to balance the risk differently. Many allow wrongful-arrest damages where the underlying claim ultimately fails, regardless of the arrestor’s good faith, and several require the arresting party to post counter-security at the time of the arrest as a condition of the order. The Netherlands and Belgium are known for relatively owner-friendly counter-security regimes. The 1999 Arrest Convention takes a middle path, allowing damages where an arrest was unjustified or excessive, or where excessive security was demanded, subject to national law on the standard of fault, and that broader exposure is one reason the convention has attracted few parties.

Judicial sale and clean title

If the claim is proven and no security is provided, the court orders the sale of the ship. The Admiralty Marshal appraises and sells her, usually by sealed bids or public auction, and the proceeds form the fund distributed among claimants in the order of priority. The distinctive virtue of a judicial sale, as opposed to a private sale by the owner, is that it confers clean title: it extinguishes the maritime liens, mortgages, and other charges that burdened the ship, so the buyer takes her free of prior encumbrances and the claims attach instead to the sale proceeds. This is why a ship sold by the court fetches more than the same ship sold privately under a cloud of liens.

The weakness of the judicial sale has always been its international recognition. A sale in one country conferred clean title as a matter of that country’s law, but a registry or a court in another country might not treat the sale as having cleared the old encumbrances, leaving the buyer exposed to re-arrest abroad for a lien the sale was supposed to have extinguished. The United Nations Convention on the International Effects of Judicial Sales of Ships, the Beijing Convention, addresses this. It was adopted by the General Assembly on 7 December 2022, opened for signature in Beijing on 5 September 2023, and entered into force on 17 February 2026 following ratification by Barbados, El Salvador, and Spain.

The Beijing Convention’s basic rule is that a judicial sale in one state party that confers clean title has the same effect in every other state party. It requires the registry of a state party to deregister the ship or transfer her registration at the buyer’s request, prohibits arrest of the ship in a state party for a claim arising from a right extinguished by the sale, and gives the courts of the state of sale exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to it. A notice of judicial sale and a certificate of judicial sale carry the regime, and the IMO acts as the repository for both in a public online register. The convention leaves untouched the domestic rules on how a sale is conducted and when it confers clean title; it governs only the cross-border effect once a qualifying sale has occurred.

Jurisdictional comparison

The same claim can look very different depending on where the ship is arrested, and four jurisdictions illustrate the spread. England and Wales apply the Senior Courts Act 1981, sections 20 and 21, and the Civil Procedure Rules Practice Direction 61. The section 20(2) list of claims tracks Article 1 of the 1952 convention, which England has given effect. The Admiralty Court offers developed procedure, an experienced bench, and the ability to obtain a freezing injunction against the owner’s worldwide assets alongside the in rem claim, but England grants no true lien for necessaries and applies the strict Evangelismos test on wrongful arrest.

The United States operates under the Supplemental Rules for Admiralty of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule C for arrest in rem and Rule B for maritime attachment in personam. It is party to neither arrest convention and runs its own categories. CIMLA’s true lien for necessaries makes the United States the natural forum for bunker and supply claims, though the vessel must be found within the district and the doctrines of forum non conveniens and, for some claims, laches can limit access.

Singapore applies the High Court (Admiralty Jurisdiction) Act, modeled on the English statute, and has become Asia’s leading arrest center over the past two decades, helped by an experienced admiralty bar, an efficient Sheriff, and its position on the Malacca Strait. It follows The Halcyon Isle on foreign liens and the Evangelismos test on wrongful arrest. South Africa applies the Admiralty Jurisdiction Regulation Act 1983 and its associated-ship regime, the widest reach of any common-law jurisdiction, letting a claimant look through single-ship companies to common control. Continental centers such as Rotterdam, Antwerp, and Marseille apply the 1952 convention through national law, often with easy conservatory arrest and owner-friendly counter-security, which makes the Netherlands in particular a common first-stop jurisdiction for European claims. Charter disputes over hire and off-hire, whether under a time charter party , a voyage charter party , a bareboat charter party , or the standard GENCON charter party , frequently drive the choice of arrest forum, since the claimant picks the jurisdiction whose rules on liens, security, and wrongful arrest suit its position.

Limitations

This article states the general law and the leading instruments; it is not advice on any arrest, and the outcome of a real case turns on the forum, the facts, and the current text of the local statute. Arrest law is jurisdiction-specific to a degree that resists generalization: the categories of claim that support arrest, the ranking of liens, the survival of a claim on sale, the recognition of a foreign lien, and the threshold for wrongful-arrest damages all differ between the states discussed here, and none of the ranking orders set out above is universal.

Several points are genuinely unsettled or in motion. The conflict-of-laws treatment of a foreign maritime lien remains divided between the procedural view of The Halcyon Isle, followed in England and Singapore, and the substantive view taken in Canada and, after The Sam Hawk, in Australia. The Evangelismos test on wrongful arrest is under sustained criticism even where it has been reaffirmed. The 1999 Arrest Convention and the 1993 Maritime Liens and Mortgages Convention are in force but thinly ratified, so the practitioner works from national law, not the treaty, in most major centers. The Beijing Convention entered into force only in February 2026 and binds few states so far, so its clean-title effect abroad is available only where both the state of sale and the state of the register are parties. Anyone acting on an arrest checks the current statute, the ratification status of the relevant convention, and the local rules of court before relying on the general position stated here.

Related Articles

• Salvage Convention 1989 and SCOPIC
• Towage and salvage operations
• General average and York-Antwerp Rules
• LLMC Convention on Limitation of Maritime Claims
• MLC 2006
• Bill of lading
• GENCON charter party
• Voyage charter party
• Time charter party
• Bareboat charter party
• Charter parties overview
• Flag state and flag of convenience