Anna Joubin-Bret (UNCITRAL) on the new UN Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents

The next thing. All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very pleased to be joined by Anna Zoubin-Brett, Secretary of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, or UNCITRAL. She's joining us virtually to brief on the new UN Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents. And as you can see, she is up on our screen now. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to see you. Ms. Hubben-Bret, please, the floor is yours.

Good afternoon, and thank you very much for having us. It's an honor for me to join today's Noon's Briefing. I'm the director of the International Trade Law Division in the Office of Legal Affairs. Our division serves as the secretariat for the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law that's better known as UNCITRAL. We are based in Vienna, but our sessions alternate between Vienna and New York. Our organization, our body, was established in 1966, and it serves as the core legal body of the United Nations General Assembly for modernization, harmonization, and unification of international trade law. We're delighted to see that the Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents, the Negotiable Cargo Documents that we acronym as NCDs, developed by UNCITRAL, was adopted by the General Assembly yesterday. This NCD convention is going to be a real game changer in international trade. It establishes a negotiable document of title, uh, across all modes of transport, air, road, rail, and sea, regardless of the different or the successive modes of transportation that are used for cargo. Traditionally, only the maritime transport of goods has benefited from widely recognized legal documents. Everybody knows about the bill of lading, which enables goods to be bought, sold, or used as collateral while they're still in transit. And this made perfect sense because transport by ship would typically take weeks or months before the cargo arrives. With a bill of lading, you could go to the bank and receive the payment once the cargo is put on the ship. In contrast, the documents used for goods transported by road, rail, and air are typically non-negotiable, meaning that those documents cannot be transferred to another party or to a bank as a means of transferring rights to the goods they represent or financing of a transaction. The proposal to UNCITRAL to negotiate, to develop and negotiate a convention on negotiable documents of transport was made by the government of China in 2019. Chinese enterprises and their overseas trading partners have explored ways to address the limitations of railway consignment notes that are used for railway transports on long distances And these documents, these railway consignment notes are not documents of title, and therefore they're not negotiable, which hinders the banks to provide trade finance services. In other words, they cannot function as collateral or other credit enhancement or risk mitigation tools. Now with the development of railway corridors across Central Asia, or for example, between China and Europe, or in the broader Asian region, where many countries are landlocked, or for trade within Africa, it will be a real game changer to have one single document of transport, which is multimodal, so goes across different modes of transport, which is fully electronic, meaning thereby supporting paperless trade and negotiable. Formal intergovernmental negotiations have started in UNCITRAL in 2022. The finalization of the convention has taken us three years of collaborative work among diplomats, legal experts and trade professionals. At the Secretariat, we are very proud that this success stands as another example of effective multilateralism in developing modern, harmonized legal frameworks to facilitate trade. The NCD Convention comes with several practical and important advantages. For landlocked countries, as you can imagine, or for countries with this large inland territory, it will be easier to integrate global value chains, whether for the commodities that are being shipped or for production by their MSMEs. NCDs can also enhance flexibility in trade, allowing transport modes to be switched easily in the event of disruptions, as we've known during the COVID pandemic, for example. NCDs can complement efforts to simplify trade processes, reduce transactional costs, and facilitate customs clearances as a single NCD can be issued to cover door-to-door transport. NCDs can support the digital transformation of global trade. The convention includes an entire chapter dedicated to electronic NCDs, Based on the UNCITRAL model law on electronic transferable records, which is an instrument that has already been adopted in several countries and which has been endorsed by the G7, by APEC, by the Commonwealth, we have, for example, recently the United Kingdom, Singapore, France, and China that adopted this model law on electronic transferable records. This new legal framework, these NCDs, are expected to benefit international traders, logistics providers, including freight forwarders, maritime, railroad, air carriers, banks, other financial institutions, digital service providers, and insurance companies, as well as governments. For example, the custom authorities will find that it's a very interesting and handy tool. As highlighted in the resolution adopted by the General Assembly yesterday, the new convention will reduce the costs of trade along inland routes and will assist both landlocked countries and countries with large mainland territories in integrating more effectively into global supply chains. It will also support interested countries, including coastal countries, in the digitization of negotiable cargo and transport documents. The signing ceremony for this convention is expected to take place in Accra in Ghana during the second-half of 2026. We hope that many countries will sign in and that industry stakeholders can benefit from it soon. We're extremely pleased with this result, which is another acknowledgement by states of UNCTAD's work. What UNCTAD does is practical. It's concrete. There is broad consensus about its benefits for developing states. And in this regard, I would like to draw your attention to the outcome of the Seville Finance for Development Conference. The outcome adopted by states last summer acknowledges and calls for reform of the mechanisms for settling disputes between investors and states, including through a multilateral approach towards the establishment of an advisory center on international investment dispute resolution and building on the ongoing work of UNCITRAL. I quote from the Seville Finance for Development outcome document. This centre will be of great benefit to developing countries and least developed countries, and I am happy to report that at a meeting held in Paris earlier this month, most of the remaining issues of the operationalisation of this advisory centre were resolved and that the statute of the centre is expected to be submitted to the General Assembly next year. I thank you very much for your attention and give the floor back to you, Mr. Spokesperson.

Thank you very much for your briefing. I'll now turn the floor over for questions. Yes, Desi.

Hi, this is with China Central Television. First, on behalf of the UN Correspondent Association, thank you for this briefing. It's a very technical term for us to comprehend all the things you just said. But for me, basically, I have two questions. One is, how will UNCITRAL to encourage countries, especially landlocked countries and developing countries, to adopt this electronic negotiable transport documents in practice? And secondly, we know that you are not the-- I mean, ASITRA is not the administration of small parcels. But now currently, we saw a trend of different countries, they put more tariffs or tax on small parcels. And what is this position from ASITRA on this issue? Thank you.

Thank you very much. So on the encouragement on reaching out, that is part and parcel of my, of our work in ANSETRAL. It's our mandate to accompany our texts once they've been adopted to make sure that they get actually that the conventions get adopted and get ratified by states because that's how this entire new regime will begin to work. So what we will do and what we have already done is reach out to the industry because we believe that it's from a push by the industry, by the freight forwarders, by the shippers, by the transport companies, that there's going to be a strong push on the states to become members of this new convention and to establish these negotiable cargo documents as documents of transport. We have a convention that will require 10 states to sign and ratify before it enters into force. But from the participation we had in our working group and then in the commission adopting the NCDs, we know that there are many countries interested. As I mentioned, the landlocked developing countries and least developed countries are going to be really very important beneficiaries. And therefore, we hope that with a bit of push from the industry and with some awareness and promotion from our side, we will hopefully get this NCD regime up and running fairly soon. On the question regarding small parcels, I think that this is exactly as you said. This is not within UNCITRAL's purview. We are really here to harmonize international trade law from the infrastructure point of view, from the legal infrastructure, and not looking at, for example, negotiations among states on tariffs, that are more within the purview of the World Trade Organization. So we are really working on the international law part of the private international or international private law part and setting the basis on which then countries can trade and negotiate among themselves how they wish to liberalize and further facilitate trade.

Thank you. I don't see any other questions from the press, but one thing I was wondering is that, in terms of other UN agencies and their role, is there a role for the International Maritime Organization to play in this? And would you coordinate anything with them once this legal regime is up and running?

Well, we have actually a very good cooperation with the International Maritime Organization for a previous convention of ours, which has been adopted in 2022 and which opened for signature in 2023. And the depository of this convention is the International Maritime Organization. It's about the judicial sale of ships. So this is really about shipping and maritime only, and therefore it went straight to our brothers and sisters at the IMO. But for this one, it's a bit broader than only the maritime aspects of the maritime leg of transport, and therefore it's going to remain within the UN, the broader UN purview and we are not going to align with or to work with one particular unit of the United Nations on its promotion. But we are already working with UNSCAP, with probably ECLAC. The regional commissions are going to be very interested in this product. We had them working with us in the negotiations themselves, so no doubt they will help us in the promotion.

And thank you. And I also have an online question from Jenny Messenger from Global Trade Review. And she asks, are you confident that enough countries will adopt it for it to become effective? And do you know of any countries that are committed to doing so?

It's early to say that countries are committed to doing so, but we are extremely confident, actually, that many countries will adopt it. We had discussions with the African Continental Free Trade Zone, which is all about facilitating intra-African trade and having one single document of transport for all these countries involved in the African Free Trade is going to be a very, very meaningful tool. Similarly, we know that the Central Asian countries that are along these trade corridors that goes from China to Europe are going to be extremely interested in joining. We've had many countries already inquiring, participating in the deliberations themselves. And I think that's the proof of the pudding is, of course, in the adoption and ratification, but if I can say from their participation in the negotiations themselves, it seems that there's going to be a lot of uptake.

Okay. I think that's it for questions. So I would like once more to thank our guest. Thanks very much, Anna. This is Anna Jouvin-Brett, Secretary of the UN Commission on International Trade Law. Thanks very much for your briefing and good luck with the convention.

Thank you. Thank you very much, colleagues. And I hope to see you soon, maybe in person in New York. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Thank you.