Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine

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Flag of the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine.
Palais du Rhin
Main entrance of the Palais du Rhin with the ZKRS flag
Commission meeting room in the Palais du Rhin

The Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (CCNR) ( French : Commission Centrale pour la Navigation du Rhin (CCNR) ; Dutch : Centrale Commissie voor de Rijnvaart (CCR) ) is an international organization based in Strasbourg (France). Your job is primarily the development and further development of the Member States of the revised Rhine Navigation to be adopted regulations on all aspects of shipping on the Rhine , it checks next to all the complaints it because of the application of the revised Rhine Navigation and the implementation of jointly by the Contracting states issued regulations are presented. Your Appeals Chamber may in appeals against decisions of the national Rhine courts are called. In addition, the Commission is working towards the further development of inland waterway law and is initiating further international agreements to this end.

history

The Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine was created with the final act of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as a diplomatic conference for the preparation of the Act on the Navigation of the Rhine. It met for the first time on August 15, 1816 in Mainz , where it actually took over the administrative structure of the Treaty on Rhine Shipping Octroi of October 15, 1804. The representatives of France , the Netherlands , Prussia , Baden , Hesse , Bavaria and Nassau took part in the negotiations. The negotiations dragged on for a long time, as Prussia and the Netherlands were arguing about whether the freedom of the Rhine should apply to the open sea or only to the estuary ports, ie whether the Netherlands should be allowed to demand customs duties for incoming and outgoing seagoing vessels; the Prussian representative Wilhelm von Humboldt therefore stayed away from the negotiations from 1825 to 1829. In the following years she worked on the Mainz Act , which was passed on March 31, 1831.

With the entry into force of the Act, the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine became an international organization with its own legal personality and headquarters in Mainz. In 1861 the commission was moved to Mannheim.

On October 17, 1868, the Mannheim Act was passed by the six members (Nassau was annexed by Prussia in 1866), which replaced the regulations of 1831 and which still exists today as a basic document for navigation on the Rhine. After the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, the newly founded German Empire annexed Alsace-Lorraine and with it the entire banks of the Rhine in France. France leaves the CCNR. The German Reich, on the other hand, did not become a member of the CCNR, but the previous members remain as member states of the empire as well as the new Reichsland Alsace-Lorraine members of the CCNR.

After the First World War, the Versailles Treaty reorganized the work of the Central Commission in Articles 354 ff. France became a leading member with permanent chairmanship, the German Reich replaced its member states as members. Belgium joined the Mannheim Act. The United Kingdom (left at the end of 1993) and Italy (left in 1937) became members of the CCNR as non-shore states and non-signatories of the Mannheim Act. Switzerland also received a seat in the CCNR without signing the Mannheim Act, while the Netherlands accepted the amendment to the Mannheim Act by the Versailles Treaty in an additional protocol in 1923. As a result, the seat of the commission was relocated to Strasbourg in 1920 and a permanent secretariat was set up in the Palais du Rhin there .

In 1936, the German Reich unilaterally declared in a note on the German waterways of November 14, 1936 that it was no longer bound by the international regime over the Rhine and other rivers.

After the Second World War, the CCNR resumed its work in autumn 1945. Part of the revision by the Versailles Treaties was mutually repealed and the United States (left in 1964) were first accepted in exercising the rights of occupation . As early as 1950, Germany (more precisely the Federal Republic) was re-admitted to the CCNR.

In 1963, the Convention on the Revision of the Revised Rhine Navigation Act was the last major revision of the provisions in which Switzerland acceded to the Convention. Since then, a further seven additional protocols have been agreed.

The Central Commission is the first international organization worldwide and at the same time the oldest still in existence today.

tasks

The tasks of the Central Commission include ensuring the freedom of the Rhine as a waterway, the safety of Rhine traffic and the economic promotion of shipping on the Rhine.

These include in particular:

  • the further development of the Rhine Shipping Police Ordinance (RheinSchPV), which contains traffic regulations as well as regulations on ships, their sizes, labeling and equipment, water protection and waste disposal
  • Technical regulations for inland waterway vessels
  • Crew and Personnel Regulations
  • Regulations for the transport of dangerous goods

These regulations are drawn up in close cooperation with the member states and then adopted by them in their respective national law. Compliance with the regulations is monitored by the water protection and shipping police of the Rhine bank states. For this purpose, Germany and France have set up a joint Franco-German water police ( Compagnie fluviale de gendarmerie du Rhin ) based in Kehl and branches in Gambsheim and Vogelgrun for their joint route on the Upper Rhine since 2012 .

In Rhine things can beside the Rhine superior courts and the Central Commission as optional appeals court to call.

literature

  • Karl-Heinz Bauer: The Appeals Chamber of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine in Strasbourg . In: Peter Hanau, Egon Lorenz, Hans-Christoph Matthes (eds.): Festschrift for Günther Wiese on his 70th birthday . Neuwied, Kriftel: Luchterhand, 1998. ISBN 3-472-03458-0 . Pp. 1-9.
  • Adriaan Bos: Reflections on the provision of the Act of Mannheim enshrining the right of complaint to the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine . In: Niels Blokker, Sam Muller (Eds.): Towards More Effective Supervision by International Organizations: Essays in Honor of Henry G. Schermers. Volume I . Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1994. ISBN 0-7923-3159-1 . Pp. 205-215.
  • Dale S. Collinson: The Rhine Regime in Transition: Relations between the European Communities and the Central Commission for Rhine Navigation . In: Columbia Law Review 72 (1972) pp. 485-516.
  • WE Haak: Experience in the Netherlands regarding the case-law of the Chamber of Appeal of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine . In: Netherlands Yearbook of International Law 19 (1988) pp. 3-51.
  • Günter Hoog : Rivers and canals of the Federal Republic of Germany . In: AVR 25 (1987) pp. 202-231.
  • Anne Schulte-Wülwer-Leidig: How rivers connect people and landscapes: Experience from international cooperation on the Rhine in the field of water protection . In: Xuewu Gu (Ed.): Cross-border cooperation between regions in Europe . Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2002. ISBN 3-7890-7777-1 . Pp. 105-121.
  • Anne Schulte-Wülwer-Leidig, Koos Wieriks: Cross-border water protection on the Rhine: Development of holistic, sustainable water protection in international cooperation . In: Jörg Barandat (Hrsg.): Water - Confrontation or Cooperation: Ecological Aspects of Security using the Example of a World-Wide Commodity . Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1997. ISBN 3-7890-4829-1 . Pp. 298-315.
  • Guido Thiemeyer, Isabel Tölle, Supranationality in the 19th Century? The examples of the Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine and the Octroi Treaty 1804–1832, in: Journal of European Integration History, Vol. 17 (2011), pp. 177–196.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johann Ludwig Klüber : Acts of the Vienna Congress in the years 1814 and 1815 . Verlag JJ Palm and Ernst Enke, Erlangen 1815, Vol. 3: Acts of the Congress Commission for the freedom of river navigation .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Adalbert Rittmüller: 180 years of the Central Commission for Rhine Shipping . In: Foreign Service . No. I , 1996, p. 77 ff . ( ccr-zkr.org [PDF]).
  3. ↑ RGBl. II, p. 361
  4. ↑ Shipping police / traffic regulations on the website of the Central Commission.
  5. ↑ Station of the water police in Kehl is a German-French success story ( memento from February 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Ortenau city gazette
  6. ↑ Information on the function, procedure and composition of the Appeals Chamber on the CCNR website: Appeals Chamber . [1]