Week of 3 to 9 August 2026
Preliminary note: the week was quiet in terms of French case law strictly speaking, but was dense on the front of international law of the sea and the interplay between sanctions, prize law and marine environmental law — three branches that the crisis of the Russian “shadow fleet” continues to bring together in ways that merit the attention of legal scholarship.
I. Litigation and international maritime judicial law
1. ITLOS — Cases No. 34 and 35 (Nauru Ocean Resources Inc. and Tonga Offshore Mining Ltd. v. International Seabed Authority)
By orders of 4 August 2026, the President of the Seabed Disputes Chamber, Judge Attard, ruled on the next steps in the proceedings brought by these two companies, sponsored respectively by Nauru and Tonga, against the ISA. These cases, whose public hearings concluded in early July, extend the decade’s major litigation over deep-seabed mining: they raise questions about the scope of sponsoring states’ “due diligence” obligation under the Chamber’s 2011 advisory opinion, in a context where several states (including the United States, which is not a party to UNCLOS) have begun issuing unilateral licences for high-seas exploitation. The outcome of this litigation will largely determine the credibility of the international seabed regime as the common heritage of mankind.
2. Supreme Court of Sweden — restitution of the Caffa cargo to Ukraine (4 August 2026, disclosed on 6 August)
A ruling hailed as “historic”: Sweden’s highest court upholds the return to Ukraine of a vessel from the Russian shadow fleet, boarded in March for transporting looted Ukrainian grain. The ruling is of particular doctrinal interest on two counts: it implicitly settles the question of the law applicable to ownership of a vessel whose flag and actual operator are deliberately dissociated (shell arrangements, cascading flag changes typical of “shadow shipping”); and, following on from the boarding measures authorised by the EU Council in July, it opens up a body of national case law implementing sanctions that resembles, without naming it as such, a contemporary right of prize — a subject that classical maritime law believed had been relegated to the 19th century.
3. Useful reminder — civil immunity of the maritime pilot
Although unrelated to the week under review, Decision No. 2026-1208 QPC of 25 June 2026 continues to shape pilotage litigation: the Constitutional Council upheld the constitutionality of Article L. 5341-11 of the Transport Code, referred to it at the request of GIE Norgal, supported by TotalEnergies Petrochemicals France and Chane Terminal Le Havre. The ruling reinforces the pilot’s civil immunity towards third parties and invites close attention to how this immunity interacts, on appeal, with the concept of “nautical fault” exempting the carrier under Article IV § 2(a) of the Hague-Visby Rules — two exemption regimes whose overlap remains technically delicate for practitioners to navigate.
II. Regulation, sanctions and flag-state policing
4. The European Union’s twenty-first sanctions package
A doctrinally significant shift: Member States will now be able to confiscate and sell oil and goods carried by a shadow-fleet vessel as soon as it is boarded during a naval operation, without waiting for the outcome of full judicial proceedings. This mechanism, which adds to the roughly 650 vessels already listed under sanctions, takes maritime sanctions law a step further towards a logic of immediate administrative policing, risking tension with the traditional guarantees of freedom of navigation and property rights — an area in which litigation before national courts (including the Swedish case above) is beginning to provide answers.
5. French regulation
Decree No. 2026-753 of 8 August 2026 (Official Journal Nos. 0184 and 0185) authorises a data-processing scheme relating to the collection of information in marinas, pursuant to Article L. 232-9 of the Internal Security Code — an administrative port-policing measure worth noting for firms advising marina operators. Also worth recalling, as summer background, Decrees No. 2026-434 and 2026-440 of 2 June 2026, which amended regulations on maritime pilotage, port policing and dangerous conduct at sea.
6. War-risk zones and marine insurance
London’s Joint War Committee extended the recognised “war risk” zone in the Red Sea by around 800 km northward, now bringing the ports of Jeddah and Yanbu within the surcharge perimeter. “War risk” premium rates have risen to around 1% of insured value for crossings of the southern Red Sea. On the contractual side, this development calls for a review of the scope of the BIMCO CONWARTIME/VOYWAR clauses in current charterparties and the zone-refusal option they grant to shipowners.
III. Marine environment and decarbonisation
7. Oil pollution off the coast of Oman
An oil slick of around 600 km² has spread from the wreck of the tanker Caroline Bezengi, linked to the Russian shadow fleet. The incident is a concrete illustration of the systemic risk that these vessels — whose P&I cover is structurally uncertain or fictitious — pose to the international regime of liability and compensation for pollution damage (1992 CLC Convention, IOPC Funds, 2001 Bunker Convention): when the insurer cannot be found or is insolvent and the owner is a shell entity, it is the supplementary fund — and ultimately the community of contributing cargo owners — that bears the risk, adding further weight to the argument for tightening classification and mandatory insurance controls at strategic chokepoints.
8. IMO framework — Net-Zero Framework
Following on from MEPC 84 (April-May 2026), intersessional discussions continue on a revised framework, with the IMO having set a tight timetable to reach agreement by the end of 2026. The fault lines remain unchanged: outright US opposition, reluctance from several developing states over the fund mechanism, and support from the EU and island states. For scholars of international marine environmental law, this remains the best current vantage point on the tension between the IMO’s technical soft law and the stricter regulatory standards sought by the most ambitious states.
9. EU ETS (maritime)
2026 marks the end of the phase-in period: shipping companies must now surrender allowances covering 100% of their verified CO2 emissions, and methane and nitrous oxide are included in the scope of coverage for the first time. The Commission has also put forward an extension of the scheme to vessels of 400 to 5,000 GT, which, if adopted, would bring a significant share of coastal shipping and feeder services within the scope of the European carbon market — a question whose contractual implications (passing on carbon costs in charterparties, BIMCO ETS clauses) remain an open area of work for practitioners.
IV. Cross-cutting analysis
The common thread running through the week is not so much a single text or ruling as an underlying dynamic: classical maritime law — freedom of navigation, professional immunities, limitation of liability — is increasingly being drawn into external logics of policing (sanctions, security), climate regulation and governance of the commons (the seabed). The Russian shadow fleet alone illustrates this overlap: it is simultaneously a matter of sanctions law, of environmental liability law, and, as the Swedish ruling shows, a revealing test of the limits of classical vessel-nationality law when confronted with opacity arrangements. For practitioners, the real challenge lies less in mastering each text in isolation than in anticipating the points of friction between these regimes — insurance, sanctions, environment — which now overlap on a single vessel and a single voyage.
V. Major developments of the first half of 2026
With hindsight, three dynamics have shaped these seven months of maritime law. The first is the methodical continuation of the IMO’s and the European Union’s decarbonisation agenda: the EU ETS phasing in to 100% of verified emissions, the new North-East Atlantic ECA adopted at MEPC 84, the proposed extension of the EU ETS to vessels of 400 GT, and the postponement — revealing persistent international tensions — of the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework to December 2026. The second is the continuing escalation of the sanctions regime targeting the Russian “shadow fleet”, which over seven months has moved from a logic of vessel designation to one of immediate administrative policing (confiscation and resale of cargo upon boarding), with implications that remain poorly settled under general international law of the sea. The third is a particularly dense international body of case law from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea — the Heroic Idun ruling (record compensation award), unprecedented provisional-measures orders from the Seabed Disputes Chamber, and the constitution of the Ghana/Togo Chamber — confirming this tribunal’s growing prominence as a forum for resolving contemporary maritime disputes, alongside a quieter body of French litigation focused on consolidating the protective status of the maritime pilot.
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