The role of incoterms for standardisation in international trade law

International Trade Terms (International Commercial Terms - Incoterms) are a set of rules on international trade published by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a non-governmental business organization. Although more than a hundred years have passed since its founding, Incoterms (one of its most important products) were not adopted until 1923. However, its main clauses Free on Board (FOB) and Cost and Insurance (CIF) existed in British trade, the first since 1812 and the second since 1895. International trade terms contain guidelines on most aspects of international trade that have been regularly innovated since their first version, and since Incoterms 1980, every ten years. Among other rules, there is a clause on the obligations of the contracting parties to insure goods against transport risks, which first appeared in the version of Incoterms 1953. Later versions of Incoterms (V-VIII) bring changes and further improvements to the insurance clause in line with the development of international business practices such as: the transition from the Free of Particular Average (FPA) clause, which dates back to 1946, to a newer version of the 1979 cargo clause; containerization; and other technological advances in transportation. These breakthroughs led to the need to expand the number of clauses from the previous six in 1953 to fourteen in 1990, in order to stabilize their number to eleven in 2000. The last change is the version of Incoterms 2020, which came into force on January 1st 2020