Your ship has sunk, run aground or lain for months on the bottom of a dock, and the authorities write to tell you that you must remove her at your own expense, within a deadline they set alone, failing which they will do it themselves and send you the bill.
You are facing:
- a formal notice from the maritime prefect or the departmental prefect to remove a dangerous wreck
- a recovery order claiming the costs of locating, marking and raising the ship
- an insurer or a P&I club disputing wreck removal cover
- an abandoned or derelict vessel occupying a berth in your port
- a sunken pleasure craft, uninsured, whose owner cannot be found
On 16 December 2011, the cargo ship TK Bremen ran aground on Kerminihy beach at Erdeven, in the Morbihan, after dragging her anchor during storm Joachim. She was broken up where she lay, over several weeks. The bill raises a question that is simple to state and formidable to answer: who pays for removing a wreck, up to what amount, and before which court.
This page is written for owners and operators of merchant ships, fishing vessels and pleasure craft, for insurers and P&I clubs, for ports and coastal authorities, for salvage and wreck removal contractors, and for buyers of older ships who discover after the sale that what they bought was a removal obligation. It covers the legal status of a wreck, administrative police powers, insurance, limitation of liability and recourse actions. It extends our maritime law page.
What counts as a wreck in law
The word is misleading. In ordinary speech a wreck is a ship in poor condition; in French law it is a legal characterisation that triggers administrative police powers and answers to precise criteria. Article L. 5142-1 of the French Transport Code covers wrecks of ships, maritime drones and other floating craft, goods and cargo, aircraft wrecks and any other object lying in the territorial sea, in internal waters downstream of the transverse limit of the sea, within the administrative limits of ports or on the shores of the maritime public domain. It lays down three cumulative conditions: loss of buoyancy, absence of any crew on board, and the absence of any measures of custody or handling. Deliberate abandonment intended fraudulently to remove the property from customs rules is excluded from the benefit of that characterisation.
A ship that is still afloat is not a wreck, however empty, rusted, uninsured and unreachable her owner may be. She falls under the abandoned vessel regime of Articles L. 5141-1 and following of the French Transport Code, which we deploy in port matters on the basis of Articles L. 5141-2-1 and L. 5141-3: formal notice, then, in the absence of any response, forfeiture of the owner’s rights and taking of possession by the administrative authority. That is the route used against so called derelict hulls, the motionless vessels that have occupied a berth for years.
Here lies the trap: the buoyancy threshold. As long as the hull stays afloat, the port cannot invoke the wreck procedure; once she sinks, it can, but the operation costs ten times more. Some managers wait. That is a management error as much as a legal one.
A third regime overlays the first two. Old wrecks of prehistoric, archaeological or historical interest are maritime cultural property, governed by Articles L. 532-1 and following of the French Heritage Code. Whoever finds them must leave them in place and declare them within forty eight hours to the department for underwater and subaquatic archaeological research. The galleon does not belong to the person who found her.
The 2007 Nairobi Wreck Removal Convention
Adopted on 18 May 2007 and in force since 14 April 2015, the Nairobi International Convention on the Removal of Wrecks was signed by France on 24 September 2008 and published by Decree no. 2016-615 of 18 May 2016, which sets its entry into force for France at 4 May 2016; Ordinance no. 2021-266 of 10 March 2021 drew the consequences in the French Transport Code.
Its natural field is the exclusive economic zone, the area where the coastal State’s police powers were, before it, at their most uncertain. Article 3 § 2 allows a State to extend the convention to its territorial sea by declaration. The impact assessment attached to the ratification bill and the Senate report announced that France would make that declaration; the 2021 report to the President of the Republic states, on the contrary, that the ordinance confined the national regime of Article L. 5142-1 to internal waters and the territorial sea in order to avoid any overlap with the convention in the exclusive economic zone. The two readings cannot be reconciled. We therefore check the state of the French declarations with the Secretary General of the International Maritime Organization before founding a strategy on either text, because the regime applicable to a wreck lying six miles off Ouessant is not the same depending on the answer, because the limitation periods differ, because the competent court differs, and because the question of limitation of liability, to which we shall return, arises in radically opposite terms according to whether one reasons on the convention or on domestic law.
The definition of a wreck in Article 1 § 4 is wider than the French one. It covers a sunken or stranded ship, any part of such a ship, any object lost at sea from her, and also a ship that is about to sink where no effective assistance is under way. The ship has not yet gone down and she is already a wreck. What follows is linear: reporting by the master and the operator (Article 5), determination of the hazard by criteria relating to depth, shipping routes, cargo and environmental risk (Article 6), locating (Article 7), marking (Article 8), removal (Article 9), with the affected State setting a deadline for the registered owner and entitled, once that deadline has passed or in case of urgency, to carry out the removal itself.
The liability of the registered owner
Article 10 of the Nairobi Convention imposes strict liability on the registered owner for the costs of locating, marking and removing the wreck. No fault to prove. The link between the maritime casualty and the wreck is enough, and the owner answers even where he has entrusted the operation of the ship to a bareboat charterer.
There are four exceptions, to be construed strictly: act of war, a natural phenomenon of an exceptional, inevitable and irresistible character, the intentional act or omission of a third party, and the negligence of a government in maintaining navigational aids. A winter gale in the Channel is not an exceptional natural phenomenon; a blow forecast three days in advance never is. Article 11 also sets the convention aside where the costs fall under the 1992 CLC Convention, the HNS Convention, the 2001 Bunkers Convention or the nuclear conventions. That allocation decides the ceiling and which insurer pays.
In domestic law, the tool is the administrative police power. The owner of a wreck dangerous to navigation, fishing or the environment receives a formal notice to put an end to the danger within a set deadline, and the authority may intervene of its own motion, at the owner’s expense and risk, where the owner is unknown or where, having been given notice, he refuses or fails to act (Article L. 5242-18 of the French Transport Code), with requisition of persons and property and temporary occupation of private land available for salving the wreck or removing the danger (Article L. 5242-17). Forfeiture of the owner’s rights may be ordered in those cases or where the wreck is more than five years old (Article L. 5142-2), an unclaimed wreck or one whose owner has been divested being open to sale for the benefit of the State (Article L. 5142-3), with the claims of salvors and administrations secured by a lien on its value (Article L. 5142-5). At sea, the decision belongs to the maritime prefect; on the shore and within the administrative limits of ports, it falls to the departmental prefect or the port authority. That location, argued over metre by metre, decides which authority is competent and whether the formal notice is lawful. The wreck may finally be sold or granted under concession, the proceeds being set off against the costs.
A removal notice runs from the moment it is served, and the deadline it sets is shorter than the time needed to mobilise lifting equipment. Every day lost brings the authority’s own intervention closer, and its cost is beyond any negotiation.
Compulsory insurance and direct action
Article 12 of the Nairobi Convention requires the registered owner of a ship of 300 gross tonnage and above to maintain insurance or other financial security covering his liability, and to carry a certificate on board. Ordinance no. 2021-266 of 10 March 2021 transposed it into Articles L. 5123-2 and L. 5123-6 of the French Transport Code: it applies to ships flying the French flag as well as to ships calling at a French port, and breach of it carries a penalty.
The decisive contribution lies elsewhere. The convention gives the affected State and any person who has borne the costs a direct action against the insurer, who may raise only the benefit of the limitation applicable to the owner and the owner’s wilful misconduct. The “pay to be paid” clause of the P&I clubs, which makes indemnity conditional on prior payment by the member, does not survive that direct action. An insolvent owner no longer shields his insurer.
Yachting and pleasure craft escape this machinery, and that is its weak point. Take a thirty metre yacht that sinks in a dock: no compulsory certificate, no direct action founded on Nairobi, and often a raising cover capped at a few tens of thousands of euros, far below the cost of a lift by floating crane. We advise ports to require, in their operating rules, an annual certificate of that cover, and to have it checked. Few do. Questions of the scope of cover fall within our marine insurance practice.
Limitation of liability: where France stands apart
The London Convention of 19 November 1976 on limitation of liability for maritime claims covers, at Article 2 § 1 (d) and (e), claims relating to the raising, removal, destruction or rendering harmless of a ship which is sunk, wrecked, stranded or abandoned, and of her cargo. Its Article 18 § 1 allows each State to exclude those claims from limitation.
France used that option. The scope of its reservation was first disputed, the Bordeaux Court of Appeal seeing in it, in 1987, a mere statement of intent; the Cour de cassation settled the point on 30 May 2006, appeal no. 04-18.076, holding that the reservation amounted to an exclusion. That is the reading we advance: in France, raising and removal costs cannot be limited. An owner who has constituted a limitation fund after a collision therefore discovers that the removal claim stays outside the fund. The other claims arising from the same casualty remain capped.
Article 10 § 2 of the Nairobi Convention refers to the applicable national or international limitation regime, which, before a French court, leads back to that reservation. A Greek owner who counts on the LLMC 1976 ceiling to stop his removal bill at Le Havre has made the wrong calculation. We set out the constitution of the fund in our French-language analysis of shipowners’ limitation of liability and the limitation fund, and the litigation that follows on our ship collision page.
Pollution and wrecks
A wreck is almost never inert. She holds bunkers, sometimes several hundred tonnes of heavy fuel oil, and a cargo that degrades. The Grande America, which caught fire and sank on 12 March 2019 off La Rochelle with her containers and her bunkers, showed that a wreck lying in two thousand metres of water remains a very active legal object.
Two conventions share the ground on hydrocarbons: the 1992 CLC Convention for oil carried as cargo by tankers, and the London Convention of 23 March 2001 on civil liability for bunker oil pollution damage for other ships. Article 11 of the Nairobi Convention gives way to them, which shifts the dividing line between the hull underwriter, the P&I club and the compensation funds. In domestic law, Article L. 218-72 of the French Environment Code, as drafted by Ordinance no. 2021-266 of 10 March 2021, allows the owner or operator of a damaged ship, or of a ship that has lost dangerous cargo, to be given formal notice to take the necessary measures, and then for those measures to be carried out of the authority’s own motion at his expense.
Lost containers answer to the same logic, with the added difficulty of identifying the owner of the goods, and therefore the ultimate debtor. Pleasure craft wrecks pollute quietly: polyester, antifouling, engine oils, hundreds of hulls on every seaboard. A ship at the end of her life is not sold for scrap like a car: Regulation (EU) no. 1257/2013 of 20 November 2013 requires ships of 500 gross tonnage and above flying the flag of a member State to be recycled in a facility on the European list and to keep an inventory of hazardous materials. The Hong Kong Convention, in force since 26 June 2025, widens that framework. We handle these subjects on our marine pollution page.
Wrecks following collision, stranding or sinking
A wreck almost always has a history, and that history governs the recourse actions. Before becoming one, the ship was a ship in danger: a tug may have intervened, a salvage attempt may have failed. Where it failed, no reward is in principle due, under the “no cure, no pay” principle, but special compensation may still be owed where the salvor limited damage to the environment. The boundary between the end of salvage and the beginning of removal is argued in figures: we address it on our marine salvage and assistance page, and in our analyses of towage and assistance charges.
Where the wreck results from a collision, the owner ordered to remove her has a recourse against the ship at fault for the costs incurred, in proportion to the degrees of fault found. That recourse is quickly lost. It is lost through the absence of a joint survey, through moving the wreck before any expert examination, through the running of the two year collision time bar. Two urgent needs coexist: removing quickly so as not to incur intervention by the authority, and preserving evidence of the ship’s condition. The answer fits in one sentence: a wreck is never removed without a prior joint survey, even one organised within forty eight hours.
Where the casualty has given rise to a sacrifice or to expenditure incurred in the common interest of ship and cargo, the question of classification as general average arises before the average adjuster has settled his draft statement. The arrest of the ship at fault, or of a ship in the same ownership, remains the most direct way of obtaining security before the fleet leaves French waters. It is decided in hours, not weeks.
Litigation and recourse actions
The removal notice and the recovery order that follows it are administrative acts. They are challenged before the administrative courts, within short time limits running from service, and experience shows that owners let those time limits expire because they are negotiating with the administration in the meantime. Negotiation does not suspend the time limit for challenge. The useful grounds concern the lack of competence of the signing authority, the characterisation of the object as a wreck, the establishment of the danger, the deadline set, and the amount of the costs, item by item, including standby and mobilisation charges.
Before the civil courts are played out the recourse against the third party at fault, the direct action against the insurer and disputes over ownership. Whoever finds a wreck must declare her to the administration within forty eight hours; he does not become owner by his discovery, but he may claim a reward on the conditions set by the French Transport Code and, for maritime cultural property, a reward under the French Heritage Code. The dream of treasure runs into a statute.
There is a criminal dimension too, abandonment of a wreck and failure to declare being punishable, as is the failure to insure under Article L. 5123-6 of the French Transport Code. As to time bars, Article 13 of the Nairobi Convention confines the action for reimbursement to three years from the determination of the hazard, with no action being brought more than six years after the maritime casualty. For claims under domestic law, the periods differ according to the action and the court seised. Those are the first dates we note in a new file.
How the firm works
We act for owners and operators served with a formal notice or a recovery order, for hull underwriters and P&I clubs weighing cover against refusal, for ports faced with abandoned hulls, and for wreck removal contractors whose invoices are disputed.
The work begins with characterisation, because everything turns on it: wreck or abandoned vessel, internal waters, territorial sea or exclusive economic zone, national regime or Nairobi Convention. We then organise the joint survey, we argue the deadline and the scope of the formal notice, we bring the direct action against the insurer, we prepare the challenge before the courts and we secure the recourse against the third party at fault, ship arrest included.
Based in Paris, the firm acts in every French port, in mainland France and overseas, before the commercial and civil courts of the coast and before the Paris Maritime Arbitration Chamber, and works in English with P&I clubs, insurers and foreign counsel. Our map of the ports sets out the areas where we act.
Analyses and guides
Our marine pollution page sets out the allocation between the CLC, Bunkers and HNS conventions, and our analysis of who pays for marine pollution and how much follows the money to the insurer and the compensation funds. Our practical guide to marine pollution deals with bunkers left inside a wreck; our guide to port liability is written for those who manage docks and berths.
Does your situation resemble one of those described here? Tell us the facts and we will tell you the applicable regime, the time limits and the strategy.
Everything on wreck removal
Our practical guides
Frequently asked questions
Who pays for removing a ship sunk in a French port?
The owner. Article 10 of the 2007 Nairobi Convention places on him, without any fault having to be proved, the costs of locating, marking and removing the wreck. In domestic law, Article L. 5242-18 of the French Transport Code allows a formal notice to be served on him and then intervention of the authority’s own motion at his expense and risk, and Article L. 5142-2 permits forfeiture of his rights. He keeps his recourse against the third party at fault, but he advances the money.
Is an abandoned boat that is still afloat a wreck?
No, not for the purposes of French law. Article L. 5142-1 of the French Transport Code presupposes loss of buoyancy, the absence of any crew on board and the absence of any measures of custody or handling. A ship that stays afloat falls under the abandoned vessel regime of Articles L. 5141-1 and following, with a formal notice and then forfeiture of the owner’s rights. The Nairobi Convention is wider: its Article 1 § 4 includes a ship that is about to sink where no effective assistance is under way.
Can I cap my removal bill through limitation of liability?
Not before a French court. The London Convention of 1976 covers those claims at Article 2 § 1 (d) and (e), but its Article 18 § 1 allows them to be excluded from limitation, and France entered that reservation. The Cour de cassation held, on 30 May 2006 (appeal no. 04-18.076), that the reservation amounted to an exclusion. Raising costs therefore remain payable beyond the ceiling.
Can the State proceed directly against my insurer?
Yes, for ships subject to the insurance requirement. Article 12 of the Nairobi Convention requires a certificate for ships of 300 gross tonnage and above and gives a direct action against the insurer to whoever has borne the costs. The insurer may raise only the limitation the owner would enjoy and the owner’s wilful misconduct. Ordinance no. 2021-266 of 10 March 2021 wrote that obligation into Articles L. 5123-2 and L. 5123-6 of the French Transport Code, on pain of penalty.
How long does the administration have to claim the costs from me?
Under the Nairobi Convention, Article 13 confines the action for reimbursement to three years from the date on which the affected State determined the existence of the hazard, with no action being brought more than six years after the maritime casualty. The two limits operate together: the second always prevails. For claims under domestic law, the period depends on the action and on the court.
I found a wreck while diving, can I keep it?
No. The finder must declare it to the maritime authority within forty eight hours and take such protective measures as he can; he may claim a reward, but the discovery transfers no ownership. If the object is of prehistoric, archaeological or historical interest, it is maritime cultural property within the meaning of Articles L. 532-1 and following of the French Heritage Code: it must be left in place and declared within the same period.
I bought an old ship: must I remove her if she sinks?
Yes, and that is the principal risk of such purchases. The liability under Article 10 of the Nairobi Convention rests on the registered owner at the date of the casualty, whatever the condition of the ship at the sale and whatever the price. Anyone who pays a token euro for a thirty year old hull is buying a removal obligation worth far more. Checking the insurance and negotiating a warranty clause from the seller are matters for before signature, not after the sinking.
How do I challenge a formal notice from the maritime prefect?
By an application to the administrative court, within the period running from service, discussions opened with the administration having no suspensive effect on it. The grounds concern the competence of the signing authority, which depends on the exact position of the wreck, the characterisation of the object as a wreck, the establishment of the danger, the deadline set and, where a recovery order has been issued, the detail of the costs. Interim relief proceedings sometimes allow its enforcement to be suspended.
Matters in this field are handled by Hervé Guyader, lawyer at the Paris Bar and doctor of law.