DECLARATION OF PARIS

Declaration  of  Paris.An  international  agreement,  signed  by  Great  Britain,  France,  Turkey,

Sardinia, Austria, Prussia, and Russia in 1856 (at the end of the Crimean War), providing that (1)

privateering is illegal, (2) with the exception of contraband, a neutral flag covers an enemy’s goods,

(3) with the exception of contraband, neutral goods cannot be confiscated under a hostile flag, and

(4)  a  blockade  must  work  to  be  binding.  •  The  agreement  was  later  adopted  by  most  other

maritime powers, except the United States and a few others.

“The Declaration  of Paris is one of the greatest triumphs won by commercial interests over

the strict rules of maritime warfare. Its importance resides in its first three articles. Article 4 did no

more  than  formulate  a  principle  acknowledged  for  more  than  a  century.  Construed  strictly  it

requires an impossibility; for no blockade, however strict, can always ‘prevent access to the coast

of the enemy.’ But it is clear that the words were meant to be understood in a reasonable sense as

merely prohibitory of ineffective or ‘paper’ blockades …. Article 1 struck at a most objectionable

practice.  The current  of  opinion had  long  been  running  strongly against the  use  of  privateers….

Article 2 … has provoked an enormous amount of controversy. Together with Article 3 it amounted

to a new departure in the  law  of  maritime  capture. Up  to 1856 the  great naval powers  had been

divided between the old principle that the liability of goods to capture should be determined by the

character of their owner, and the more modern principle … that the character of the ship in which

the  goods  were  laden  should  settle  their  fate.”  1  R.H.  Inglis  Palgrave,  Palgrave’s  Dictionary  of

Political Economy 520–21 (Henry Higgs ed., 2d ed. 1925). [Blacks Law 8th]