From 13 to 17 May 2025, the 44th International Conference of Comité Maritime International (CMI Tokyo Conference) (*) was held in Tokyo.
The Conference was a great success with around 450 participants from about 50 countries. Many presentations and discussions were made in respect of legal issues arising from a wide variety of hot topics in maritime field, i.e. Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS), Decarbonisation, Mobile Offshore Renewable Units (MORU), Electronic Bills of Lading and many others. The latest status of two international conventions to the birth of which CMI made great contributions, the Rotterdam Rules and the Beijing Convention for the International Effects of Judicial Sales of Ships, was also introduced. And on its final day, The CMI Lex Maritima 2025 (The Tokyo Principles of Maritime Law) was adopted. This is of non-binding nature but a product of CMI’s more than 10-year attempts to restate what may be considered as general principles of maritime law in various aspects. It is expected that the adopted final version will soon be published at https://comitemaritime.org/work/lex-maritima/ or some other place in CMI’s website. Further details of the Conference can be found at https://cmi2025tokyo.org or https://comitemaritime.org/event/japan-conference/.
We supported the Conference as one of its Gold Sponsors. All of our member attorneys, except Mr. Satoshi Fukamachi now sitting in London for his LLM course, attended the Conference. In particular, Mr. Akiyoshi Ikeyama joined the preparatory works for the Conference as one of Directors, Steering Committee Members as well as Organizing Committee Members of the Japanese Maritime Law Association who acted as the host MLA of the Conference. He also spoke as one of the panelists at “Asia-Pacific Insight: the Views from NMLAs” session held on 15 May. Mr. Ryoichi Kasahara joined the preparatory works for the Conference as one of Operational Committee Members of the Japanese MLA and was heavily involved in the planning and preparations for “yCMI Social Event” on 13 May and “yCMI: The Digital Transformation of Maritime Law” session on 17 May as one of international members of the “CMI Young Lawyers” committee at CMI. Other members also attended the Conference as much as they can to build and deepen the networks with participants from all over the world.
（photo: “Asia-Pacific Insight: the Views from NMLAs” session）
（Source: https://cmi2025tokyo.org）
It was our great honor and pleasure that we had an opportunity to join such a historic international conference. We hope we have another chance to join the conference like this in any manner in the future too.
* The Comité Maritime International (https://comitemaritime.org) is an NGO (Non-Governmental Organisation) established in 1897, the object of which is to contribute by all appropriate means and activities to the unification of maritime law in all its aspects. It is headquartered in Antwerp. The current President is Dr. Ann Fenech. The Japanese Maritime Law Association (https://jmla.jp) is a public interest incorporated foundation in legal terms originally established in 1901, the objective of which is to contribute to the unification of maritime law and other sound development of maritime law. It is an active member of the CMI. The current President is Prof. Tomotaka Fujita, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo.
The CMI has held its international conferences every four years in principle at various places in the world – they also hold a slightly smaller size conference called colloquium in between them – and the previous international conference in Tokyo was held in 1969 as their 28th International Conference. It has long been awaited that we would host the second Conference. It was originally planned to be held in 2020, the same year of second Tokyo Olympic Games, but was postponed due to COVID-19 pandemic. Now Japan hosted the Conference for the first time in 56 years. The late Mr. Shiro Abe, the founder of our firm, was also involved in the preparations for and participated in the previous International Conference in 1969 as one of the then Executive Committee Members.