GlossaryEN1 min readUpdated: Jun 26, 2026

Multimodal Transport Legal Liability Conventions

Quick Answer

Last updated: 26 June 2026Published: 19 June 2025

Source: https://fiata.org/resources/fiata-documents/

Category

Find a matching partner on this lane

Reading time

1 min

Words

158

Mentioned in

–

Definition & Explanation

Multimodal transport legal liability conventions are international treaties and regulatory frameworks that determine who – carrier, freight forwarder, or multimodal operator – bears responsibility for cargo loss, damage, or delay, and to what extent. The core legal challenge in multimodal carriage is the unknown-stage-of-damage problem: when the leg on which a loss occurred cannot be identified, the established unimodal conventions – such as the CMR for road or the Hague-Visby Rules for sea – do not apply cleanly. International instruments address this by setting liability caps expressed in weight units or special drawing rights, enumerating exemptions such as force majeure, and prescribing limitation periods for claims. Freight forwarders and multimodal operators use these frameworks to structure their insurance cover and draft enforceable standard trading conditions. Notably, no single globally binding convention exclusively governing multimodal transport liability has entered into force to date; practice therefore rests on a combination of national law, FIATA standard conditions, and applicable unimodal regimes.