Arrest of Ships - The Swedish perspective

Abstract: Since a ship is movable and on the same time a very high-priced asset, a ship owner in debt may be very tempted to move it outside a creditor´s reach. Fortunate for the creditor it exist a legal mechanism that hinders this, it is referred to as “arrest of ship”. The purpose of this paper is to outline the current legal position in Sweden regarding arrest of ships and to discuss the specific problems faced within this topic. Much effort is therefore laid on both the international and the domestic legislation and its meaning. The domestic law of Sweden is used as a primary source to find out Sweden’s legal position regarding arrest of ships and how this is dealt with in Sweden. Much focus is laid on chapter 4 of the SMC and other domestic legislation that relates to this particular chapter of the SMC. The international efforts to regulate this area are also examined by using the applicable international instruments available on this area, such as the 1952 Arrest Convention, the 1968 Brussels Convention and the Lugano Convention. So to conclude there are two “regimes” that govern the arrest institute of ships in Sweden: the “international” regime found in Chapter 4 of the SMC, based on the 1952 Arrest Convention to which Sweden is party, and the “domestic” regime governed by a number a scattered different provisions in different laws. The most important of these are RB 15:1-2§§. Before Sweden became a Contracting State to the 1952 Arrest Convention the “kvarstad” institute used to govern all attachment relating to ships. However, with the introduction of the new SMC in 1994 the international concept of arrest was introduced, but the term “arrest” is not used but rather the Swedish term “kvarstad”. This choice of wording, among other things, has made the international regime of arrest intertwined with the domestic regime of arrest, usually referred to as the “kvarstad” institute. An important thing in this context and that makes these two institutes intertwined with each other is the fact that since procedural matters are not treated in the 1952 Arrest Convention but left to lex fori, Sweden can therefore and has been applying the procedural rules on “kvarstad” even in international arrest cases. Because of this relationship it is therefore difficult sometimes to understand how matters of arrest of ships are dealt with. Hopefully this paper will make the reader more familiar in how Sweden handles arrest of ships, both in an international and national perspective.