Cape Town Convention Academic Project – 6th Conference
The Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (‘the CTC’) is one of the world’s most important commercial law treaties, and now has 73 Contracting States. Papers from the first five annual conferences, held in Oxford between 2012 and 2016, are published in the Cape Town Convention Academic Journal and are available electronically from the project website. All the papers presented at this year's conference will be included in the next edition of the Cape Town Convention Journal.
The 6th Annual Conference of the Cape Town Convention Academic Project was held on 12th and 13th September 2017 at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. The project is a joint undertaking between the Oxford Law Faculty and the University of Washington School of Law, with aspects also being undertaken under the auspices of UNIDROIT. The Project’s purpose is to facilitate the study and assessment of the Cape Town Convention and to advance its aims.
As with the previous conferences, attendees were a mixture of policy makers, regulators, practising lawyers, academics and others involved in the financing of equipment. The first part of the conference was dedicated to the draft protocol on Mining, Agricultural and Construction Equipment, which is the subject of the second meeting of Governmental Experts in Rome in the first week of October. After an introductory presentation on the status of negotiations for the Protocol from UNIDROIT (Will Brydie-Watson), there were papers on the scope of the draft Protocol (Teresa Rodriguez de las Heras Ballell), the procedure for amendments (Megumi Hara), and the rules under the Protocol in relation to accession to immovable property and to movable property (Chuck Mooney, Benjamin von Bodungen, Marek Dubovec). There was much lively debate both during the sessions and throughout the conference of these important issues.
Most of the rest of the sessions focused on discussion of the substantive provisions of the Convention and the existing Protocols, including a session on the power to dispose (Roy Goode), one on novation and assignment (Phil Durham and Robert Ricketts), one on sales (Louise Gullifer) and one on the role of the courts in enforcement (Jeffrey Wool, Mark Lessard and Paul Jebely). The conference finished with an excellent presentation by Anton Didenko of his doctoral research on the intellectual history of the Convention.