The Spanish Maritime Law Association (Asociación Española de Derecho Marítimo, AEDM) was founded on 10 January 1949 on the initiative of jurists, shipowners and insurers who wanted Spain to take an active part in the international harmonisation of maritime law. The AEDM has 147 individual and 28 collective members. It is the Spanish member of the Comité Maritime International (CMI). Just as the Russian Maritime Law Association (RUMLA), both Associations share the same goal with the CMI, as stated in Article 1 of the CMI’s Constitution–to contribute by all appropriate means and activities to the unification of maritime law in all its aspects. In practice this means taking part in the work and conferences of the CMI, promoting maritime arbitration, and running studies, reports, conferences, working groups and publications. Like the Young RUMLA, the AEDM also maintains a younger-members section–Young AEDM.

AEDM keeps academic lawyers, practising lawyers and the commercial side of the industry in regular contact and its conferences are one of the main ways of achieving that. Whilst AEDM is based in the Capital of Spain, and most of its events do take place in Madrid, some conferences are hosted in other Spanish cities.

As a member of Young RUMLA the author was particularly interested to attend events hosted by the AEDM to gain experience and share it with the Russian colleagues. The author has attended the “Naval 2026: build, repair, insure and finance” conference that took place in Santiago de Compostela on the 17 April 2026, and the National Congress on 11 and 12 June 2026 held at the Uría Menéndez Auditorium, in Madrid, under the slogan “Tides of change: Bow to Valencia.”

Naval 2026: Build, Repair, Insure and Finance, Santiago de Compostela– 17 April 2026

In 2026 the AEDM held a thematic one-day conference under the title “Naval 2026: build, repair, insure and finance.” It took place in Santiago de Compostela, on the premises of the ABANCA Foundation–the cultural arm of a bank with a strong presence in Spain and Portugal. The choice of a banking venue was not incidental: it signalled that the economic and financial side of shipping would be treated as seriously as the strictly legal one.

The format was straightforward and, for this kind of event, typical: a sequence of roundtable discussions, each devoted to one stage in the life of a vessel, with speakers drawn from across the industry rather than from the legal profession alone. Over the day the panels brought together shipyard managers, maritime lawyers in private practice, marine insurers and brokers, a structured-finance banker, a representative of the State export-credit agency and an academic. The aim of assembling such a mixed group was to examine, in one room, matters that are usually treated separately: shipbuilding, ship repair, marine insurance and ship finance, and to show how closely they are connected.

The idea running through all four sessions was the management of risk around the vessel and, in particular, around the shipyard. Seen across the day, the shipyard emerged as the point at which the industry’s legal, technical, commercial and financial risks converge: it answers to the client for the result, organises the work of others, negotiates the contract, depends on insurance to absorb what goes wrong, and needs financing to carry a long and uncertain process. The four topics discussed are summarised below.

Shipbuilding

The first session dealt with the construction contract and the position it creates for the yard. A central theme was subcontracting. Because most of the physical work is carried out by third parties, performance and liability pull apart: towards the owner the yard remains liable for the result, while its ability to recover from a subcontractor may be defeated by that party’s insolvency or inadequate insurance. The practical conclusions were that the yard must actually verify a subcontractor’s cover rather than simply require it, and that the subcontract should be drafted “back-to-back” with the main contract, so that the obligations assumed towards the owner can be passed down the chain.

The discussion also covered occupational safety, an area of particular weight in shipyards. The yard is at once the occupier of the site and the principal employer of the contractors working on it, which imposes real duties of coordination: risk assessment, verification of competence, and the prevention of dangerous overlaps between simultaneous operations, especially in confinedspace and “hot” work. Deficient coordination, it was noted, can expose the yard to administrative, criminal and social-security liability at the same time.

A further part of the session examined contract negotiation from the builder’s standpoint, presented as an exercise in constant balancing. Recurring concerns included the loss of Europe’s earlier advantage in standardisation, the tendency to sign before a project is properly defined, and the financial strain each order places on the yard. The practical advice was to fix clearly what performance is owed and by whom, to avoid open-ended formulas that expand the yard’s obligations indefinitely, to tie payments to verifiable milestones, to treat permissible delays as covering owner-driven changes rather than force majeure alone, and to resist on-demand guarantees.

Finally, the international dimension was addressed through the standard forms used in cross-border construction, in particular the widely used Norwegian Standard Form Shipbuilding Contract. Its most recent version has grown considerably, adding provisions on regulatory compliance, cybersecurity, sanctions, anti-corruption and human rights. The construction contract, in other words, increasingly carries regulatory and reputational risk alongside the traditional questions of price, time and specification, and is typically backed by specialised arbitration.

Ship repair

The second session treated ship repair as a market in its own. It is more immediate and “daily,” tied to the continuous operation of the fleet. Its defining legal feature is uncertainty of scope. Unlike a construction contract, a repair contract is rarely fully defined at the outset: its content takes shape as the owner identifies further needs and as hidden defects come to light, with constant effects on price, time and responsibility. The lawyer’s role, accordingly, is less to fix the terms once than to manage continuous variation and to record the contractual effect of each change. Negotiation, in practice, runs through the whole job.

The session was notably positive about the sector”s prospects. Owners increasingly modernise rather than simply repair, in order to meet new environmental and technological requirements; retrofit work, life-extension and digitalisation have become significant. Repair is thus closely tied to the regulatory transition of shipping: emissions, energy efficiency, fuels. The yacht segment was singled out as one in which Spain competes particularly well.

Alongside the opportunities, the panel criticised the complexity of labour and environmental regulations that limit the sector”s competitiveness in Spain. Other European countries such as Denmark, even with higher costs, offer more favourable sectoral or labour frameworks, which allows their shipyards to compete on better terms. A higher direct cost does not always imply lower competitiveness if the regulatory and operational environment proves more functional.

Marine insurance

The marine insurance panel examined how insurance works in shipbuilding and repair projects, focusing on the gap that can open between formal cover and real protection. The mere existence of a policy is not enough. What matters is the precise scope of cover, the exclusions, the liability limits, the notification periods, and which parties the policy actually protects.

Construction insurance must reflect the economic and practical reality of the project. English “all-risks” wordings remain the market reference, while Norwegian forms sit closer to hull cover but add liability and P&I elements. Cover should follow the rising value of the vessel through the build, while keeping sight of risks such as delay, breach, termination, non-delivery and the operation of refund guarantees. A large insured sum also means little if the policy carries low sublimits and broad exclusions, which often prove more decisive than the headline cover.

The panel also addressed damage discovered after the vessel has left the yard, where cover turns on the policy wording clauses on care, custody and control, and the rules on discovery and notification.

A further topic was supplementary cover for financiers, in particular mortgagees’ interest insurance. It does not replace the primary insurance but adds protection in narrow circumstances: the loss must fall within the primary cover and arise without the bank’s knowledge, and the burden of proof on the mortgagee is heavy. Set against current war-risk and sanctions exposure and recent English case law (The ZouZou,¹ The Vyssos²), it showed how closely marine insurance and ship finance now interlock.

Marine insurance is not an automatic transfer of risk. To be effective it requires risk management, careful negotiation and close attention to policy wording.

Ship finance

The panel devoted to ship finance closed the conference by approaching the subject from both practical and legal perspectives. The relationship between profitability and risk appears unbalanced: the risk is high and the return does not always sufficiently compensate for that exposure. This observation helps to explain why access to credit, or to certain guarantees, can become one of the most delicate questions for the shipyard. In this context, a distinction was drawn between financing the shipyard and financing the shipowner. As regards the former, instruments such as credit lines, refund-guarantee lines, exchange-rate insurance and documentary credits are common.

A central point from the financial side was that the value of the vessel is essentially zero until it is completed. As long as the financed asset does not yet exist as a usable and realisable asset, its capacity to serve as support for financing is very limited. The technical and productive value of the vessel under construction does not necessarily coincide with its bankable value during the process.

The comparison between categories of Spanish law and English law in international ship finance is a further challenge, because apparently equivalent terms correspond to different legal notions and produce different effects. Mortgage and hipoteca are a clear example: although routinely treated as equivalents, they are not the same construct, since the Spanish hipoteca is a real security that burdens an asset without displacing its ownership, whereas the English mortgage is closer to a conditional transfer of title that turns on the debtor’s default. Likewise, the English concept of property does not correspond univocally to “propiedad,” since it may refer to an asset, to a right or even to an estate, and ownership does not coincide exactly with the Spanish idea of dominio. In the international financing of vessels, understanding the language of the contract and of the guarantees therefore requires something more than translating terms: it requires understanding the legal logic that those terms presuppose.

National Congress “Tides of Change: Bow to Valencia,” Madrid – 11 and 12 June 2026

Two months after the Santiago conference, the AEDM held its annual National Congress on 11 and 12 June 2026 at the Uría Menéndez Auditorium in Madrid, in hybrid form. “Tides of Change: Bow to Valencia” pointed forward to the International Conference of the Comité Maritime International (CMI), which will be held in Valencia in April 2027, which is a recurring reminder of Spain’s growing visibility within the international maritime-law community and of the work that hosting the CMI will demand of the Spanish association.

The Congress was opened by Benito Núñez Quintanilla, Secretary-General for Air and Maritime Transport, and by Carlos López-Quiroga, President of the AEDM. In his opening remarks the President reviewed the four years of the current board”s work, singling out the consolidation of Young AEDM – now numbering around forty younger members – and the holding of four consecutive and wellattended national congresses. He also announced that the association’s elections would be brought forward to October, so that the incoming board would have time to prepare for the institutional task that now dominates the association’s horizon: the organisation of CMI Valencia 2027. The Congress further served to present the association’s new website and members’ application, the visible result of a digitalisation effort pursued over recent years.

Project cargo and heavy-lift

The first panel, organised by Young AEDM, was devoted to project cargo and heavy-lift operations –the carriage of exceptionally large, heavy or otherwise complex consignments. The discussion focused on how to coordinate the interests of carriers, cargo owners, insurers and logistics providers when a single movement is built from several contracts and several layers of cover. The legal interest of these operations lies precisely in that fragmentation, because a loss rarely falls neatly within one contract or one policy.

The Beijing Convention on the judicial sale of ships

The second panel examined the recently adopted Beijing Convention on the international effects of judicial sales of ships³ and its application in Spain. A judicial sale ordinarily confers on the buyer a clean title, free of pre-existing mortgages and liens; but that title is only as useful as the willingness of other States to recognise it, and historically a purchaser could not be sure that a registry or a court abroad would treat the ship as unencumbered. The Convention is designed to close that gap by providing for the international recognition of judicial sales and of the clean title they produce.

Geopolitics: the Strait of Hormuz

Ana Palacio, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain and visiting professor at Georgetown University described an international environment in which the sea is no longer a matter only of trade and transport but a question of security, energy, supply and stability, and argued that Europe must complement its longstanding regulatory and diplomatic strengths with real strategic and defensive capability, turning soft power into credible hard power. Maritime law, on this view, acquires its full importance precisely when geopolitical tension begins to interfere with the ordinary flow of trade.

That theme was taken up in a panel discussion on the Strait of Hormuz crisis and its effect on maritime transport and marine insurance. Events occurring far from Europe are felt almost immediately in European shipping and in the cost and the terms of its insurance.

Naval construction for defence and public procurement

The afternoon session on naval construction for defence and public procurement brought together private practice, industry and the public sector, including the Navy’s and the State’s legal services and the shipbuilder Navantia.

Recent case law and the Institute War and Strikes Clauses

The second day opened with a review of recent maritime case law and how standard clauses work in practice. Institute War and Strikes Clauses, the standard wordings that allocate the risks arising from war, terrorism, civil commotion, strikes and similar disruptive events, how insurers and shipowners distribute the burden of war risks, strikes and political violence. The discussion was linked to the Hormuz panel of the previous day.

The Spanish flag

The final panel turned to the Spanish flag and the competitiveness of the Spanish registry, bringing the maritime administration and the shipping industry to the same table. The known obstacles are the taxation, administrative procedure and a want of regulatory flexibility. The maritime administration and the shipping industry approached them from their different standpoints but both accepted that making the Spanish flag more attractive remains a central and unresolved challenge for the sector.

Ana Núñez, Director-General of the Merchant Marine underlined the close cooperation between the maritime administration and the AEDM and reaffirmed the commitment to strengthening the competitiveness of the Spanish flag, recalling the natural advantages–Spain’s geographical position, its more than eight thousand kilometres of coastline and its maritime tradition–on which a stronger national industry can be built.

Conclusion

The two events offer a revealing view of how the Spanish association works, keeping academics, practitioners, the commercial side of the industry, and government officials in the same room and discussing a broad range of topics of practical concern with a view of solving current problems and future development. ■

Notes