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There is no Obligation to Pay Port Dues for a Port that Has not Been Open for Public Traffic : [case review]
Vesna Skorupan Wolff
orcid.org/0000-0002-1591-7247
; Jadranski zavod Hrvatske akademije znanosti i umjetnosti, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The subject of the dispute is the payment of port dues for the use of the port shore for the loading and unloading of cargo in international traffic. The plaintiff is the Port Authority, and the respondent is a legal entity that uses the port to load and unload cargo onto its ships. The respondent contests the plaintiff’s right of action and asserts that it is a special purpose port. At the time in question, the port was declared a port open to public traffic, but all legal consequences of that decision were set aside by the judgment of the Administrative Court of the Republic of Croatia. When a court sets aside an administrative act against which an administrative dispute was initiated, the case returns to the state it was in before the annulled administrative act was passed (Art. 62 of the Judicial Disputes Act). Thus, by a final court judgment, the plaintiff was deprived of the right to charge port dues, which, in fact, never belonged to him. In ports that are not open to public traffic, the port authority is not authorised to charge port dues, which means that there is no obligation to pay port dues for the use of a port that has not been declared a port open to public traffic.
Keywords
case review; obligation to pay; port dues; port; public traffic
Hrčak ID:
312354
URI
Publication date:
27.12.2023.
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