Otonom Gemiler ve Lahey Kuralları

ABSTRACT

With the swift development of autonomous ships, there are a significant number of studies focusing on these new types of vessels. A considerable number of these studies evaluates the applicability of The Hague Rules (HR) or the Hague-Visby Rules (HVR) to these new types of vessels, concentrating on issues such as whether the autonomous ships can be considered “ships” under the HR, the seaworthiness of such vessels within the liability regime established by the HR, and the applicability of the defences available to carriers such as art. IV.2(a) under the HR to autonomous ships. And the prevailing view is that the application of the HR to autonomous ships tend to be not problematic. Whilst, this conclusion may be accepted for cases where the operation of the ship is ultimately under human control. However, technical studies on the subject suggest that such scenarios will be less common than anticipated in the routine operation of autonomous ships, because these vessels, which are expected to operate at dynamic levels of autonomy, will largely be controlled by autonomous navigation systems without human intervention for most of their voyages. Examples of accidents involving autonomous vehicles operating in land and air transport demonstrate that autonomous navigation systems inherently carry an irreducible risk of error due to the technical limitations of machine learning technologies, which are essential for their operation. It is also not possible to disregard the likelihood of similar errors occurring in the context of autonomous ships. In such cases, considering that decisions and actions taken by autonomous systems operating at higher levels of autonomy will not involve human intervention, it seems inevitable that the application of the legal regimes based on fault liability will cause significant problems in dealing with claims for loss and damage. In this context, most commentators accept that art IV.2(a) of the HR cannot be applied to fully autonomous ships because there is no fault attributable to any person, such as the captain or the crew, i.e. to a human. However, this seems immaterial: considering that under art. IV.2(q) of the HR, the carrier can escape liability for damages not caused by the fault of the carrier or his servants and agents, the carrier may avoid liability for damages arising in the course of operation of ships operating at higher degrees of autonomy without the need to rely on art. IV.2(a). Whilst, there may be no immediate difficulties in applying art. IV.2(q) to autonomous …