A Filipino, Indian or Ukrainian seafarer signs in Manila, Mumbai or Odessa an English-language contract with a company established in Cyprus or Dubai, to serve on a ship registered in Panama, operated from Geneva and calling at European ports. When wages stop being paid, each link in this chain relies on the law of another, and the seafarer, for his part, stays on board. In 2025, the ITF counted 410 ships and 6,223 seafarers abandoned worldwide, for 25.8 million dollars in unpaid wages of which only 16.5 million were recovered. Nine million dollars, gone. A French decree of 25 June 2026 and recent case law of the Cour de cassation have just redrawn, in French law, the transparency obligations and the remedies. Six points help find one’s way.
Using an intermediary transfers no liability
The maritime recruitment chain brings together four actors belonging to different legal orders (the seafarer, the agency, the shipowner, the flag) and the dispute systematically crystallises at the breaking point between the agency and the shipowner. Standard A1.4, paragraph 10, of the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC) is unambiguous on this point: nothing may be understood as diminishing the shipowner’s obligations with respect to ships flying its flag. The flag does not dilute liability. Under French law, Articles L. 5533-1 and L. 5533-3-2 of the Transport Code make the shipowner responsible for working and living conditions on board throughout the provision of labour, irrespective of the capacity of employer held by the agency. This is the most important provision of the mechanism for the practitioner: it prevents the shipowner from sheltering behind its intermediary’s fault. The agency acts, the shipowner answers. Intermediation indeed produces a simple but formidable legal result: it dissociates the capacity of employer, held by the agency, from economic control of the operation, exercised by the shipowner. The latter sets crew levels and rotations without being the employer; the agency employs without controlling the ship, the working conditions or the operator’s solvency. Each can thus point to the other, except that Standard A1.4, paragraph 10, closes precisely that escape route.
From outright prohibition to regulation: three ages of international law
Convention No. 9 on placing of seamen, adopted at Genoa on 10 July 1920, knew only one answer to the excesses of nineteenth-century crew brokers: the outright prohibition of placement for profit. A principle born of abuse, never abolished. Convention No. 179 of 22 October 1996 effected the reversal by legalising private placement subject to licensing and to the service being free for the seafarer, a logic generalised by Convention No. 181 of 1997. The Maritime Labour Convention of 2006, in force since 20 August 2013 and ratified by France, absorbs the whole and today counts 113 ratifications representing 96.6% of world gross tonnage. Its Standard A1.4, paragraph 5(b), establishes that the service is entirely free for the seafarer, with the exhaustive exception of the medical certificate, the seafarer’s book and the passport, visas remaining at the shipowner’s expense. The amendment adopted on 13 May 2022, in force since 23 December 2024, added the cardinal obligation of a system of protection by insurance, and above all that of informing the seafarer of the existence of his rights: for eighteen years, the standard had imposed a guarantee whose beneficiary could legitimately be unaware of its very existence. Not knowing about the guarantee does not bar recourse to it.
An acknowledged gap in European Union law
Directive 2009/13/EC of 16 February 2009, which transposes the European social partners’ agreement on the MLC, reproduces Regulations 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 of the convention, but not Regulation 1.4 on recruitment and placement. There is therefore, to date, no transposition in EU secondary law of the prohibition on charging fees to the seafarer, of the obligation to license services, or of the system of protection by insurance. Directive 2013/54/EU on flag State responsibilities refers precisely to that same incomplete annex, so that a Member State’s breach of Standard A1.4 escapes infringement proceedings. One lever nevertheless remains unexploited: Article 6(3) of Directive 2008/104/EC on temporary agency work already prohibits, in general terms, any charging of fees to workers by a temporary work agency, with no exclusion of the maritime sector, Directive (EU) 2015/1794 having removed the maritime exclusions from five social directives without touching it, for want of anything to remove. The text already protects, without saying so.
A French regime rebuilt and recently codified
The French regime derives from Law no. 2005-412 of 3 May 2005, upheld by the Constitutional Council (decision no. 2005-514 DC), then entirely rebuilt by Ordinance no. 2021-77 of 27 January 2021, which replaced the former licensing procedure with a declaratory registration in a national register. Decree no. 2026-536 of 25 June 2026 has just created Articles R. 5546-2 to R. 5546-2-23 of the Transport Code, in force since 1 July 2026. Its most concrete contribution for seafarers: from 1 September 2026, every private recruitment service must hand them, before any placement, a reproduction of Article L. 5546-1-5 and the contact details of its insurer (Art. R. 5546-2-7). Article L. 5546-1-6 moreover limits the maritime labour undertaking to four cases listed on a strictly exclusive basis; stepping outside them exposes the parties to a formidable accumulation, the special offence of Article L. 5546-1-8, II (15,000 euros) and the offence of unlawful labour lending of Article L. 8243-1 of the Labour Code (two years’ imprisonment and a 30,000 euro fine).
Compulsory insurance, a title of administrative policing in its own right
The most remarkable mechanism of the 2026 decree lies in the organic link it establishes between the insurance guarantee and the very administrative existence of the service: Article R. 5546-2-5 provides that registration in the national register remains valid until the expiry date of the proof of civil liability insurance, and Article R. 5546-2-6 requires the renewal certificate to be sent two months before expiry, failing which removal follows by operation of law, without adversarial procedure. Operating without registration is a fifth-class contravention. The minimum cap fixed by order nevertheless remains 5,000 euros for repatriation costs and 10,000 euros for other pecuniary losses per claim and per seafarer, amounts often insufficient in the light of actual arrears, which commonly reach eight to eighteen months of wages in cases of established abandonment.
Conflicts of laws, conflicts of jurisdictions and what to do
The law-of-the-flag clause inserted in manning contracts is valid, but largely ineffective: it cannot deprive the seafarer of the mandatory provisions of the objectively applicable law under Article 8(1) of the Rome I Regulation. Jurisdiction clauses predating the dispute are, likewise, unenforceable against him under Article 23 of the Brussels I bis Regulation, and an employer domiciled outside the Union may be sued before the judge of the place where the seafarer habitually carries out his work, on the basis of Article 21(2) of the same regulation, a solution confirmed by the Court of Justice in the ROI Land Investments judgment of 20 October 2022. The first reflex of counsel instructed by a seafarer is therefore not the merits of the dispute: it is the forfeiture period provided by the law designated in the contract, sometimes limited to eight weeks or three months, then the conservatory arrest of the ship, which the Cour de cassation has allowed since its judgment of 10 September 2025 on the mere allegation of a maritime claim, before the ship has even left port.
Guyader Avocat has published a complete practical guide on seafarer recruitment and placement, detailing the international framework, the gap in EU law, the French architecture rebuilt in 2026, the compulsory insurance regime and the strategies for conflicts of laws and jurisdictions. It is available free of charge in exchange for a professional email address: Get the seafarer recruitment guide.
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