(Lack of) legal regulation of multimodal carriage in the Republic of Lithuania

It is obvious, that multimodal transport is one of the key measures in achieving one of the most overarching objective of the European Union transport policy – sustainable growth and development. Unfortunately, in opposite to the goals set, in the year 2017, on international level there is no unified legal regulation in the field of international multimodal carriage while the need is obvious. The situation in the Republic of Lithuania is not better as there is no legal regulation of multimodal carriage on national level as well. On the other hand, there is plenty of unimodal international transport conventions. Almost all of them have several directly provisions for multimodal transport. Nevertheless, this regulation is certainly not enough to cover the full multimodal contract and to ensure legal clarity. When the possibility to directly apply the relevant unimodal international transport convention for a specific leg of multimodal carriage is highly questionable and there is no national legal regulation of multimodal carriage in the Republic of Lithuania, in the case of a dispute, it is difficult to predict the laws applicable to a multimodal contract for the carriage of goods and the possible outcome of the dispute. Therefore it is suggested to complement the Civil code of the Republic of Lithuania with the legal regulation of multimodal carriage, including legal provisions defining a concept of multimodal carriage and multimodal carriage contract, the law applicable to the multimodal carriage and in determining the carrier’s civil liability