Legal status and liability principles of autonomous ships in maritime transport

The maritime sector is witnessing an important revolution with the inclusion of unmanned vehicle management and artificial intelligence robotic technologies. The fact that ships, which play an important role in the carriage of goods, become crewless, remotely controlled or self-managed by being completely equipped with a software system brings along some legal problems that will arise in this sector. Therefore, it is important to examine what unmanned vehicles are, how they are managed, whether they have legal grounds, and if so, how these legal grounds will be applied to the concrete case. For this purpose, firstly, the concept of 'ship' will be examined within the scope of international conventions and Turkish Commercial Code No. 6102 and the legal status of control centre employees will be evaluated. In addition, it is necessary to take into consideration that the person who produces the software of these increasingly autonomous and software-controlled ships is also human and may make mistakes. In this context, factors such as human-computer interactions, risk management, navigation safety, maritime banditry are important issues to be examined within the scope of autonomous ships and the law of the sea. Nevertheless, ensuring the cyber security of autonomous ships will be one of the most important concerns in maritime transport, as in every sector that is managed and operated by software. Because maritime transport is a sector that operates 24/7 without interruption due to the fact that it serves the world supply chain, and any interruption costs billions of dollars. Another issue that requires detailed analysis is the issue of legal liability, because maritime transport inherently involves risk and danger. When any damage occurs during transport with an autonomous ship, it is unclear who can be responsible and whether that person's liability can be limited. Therefore, how the liability should be in autonomous ships is one of the issues to be examined in this thesis. Finally, the issue of insurance also needs to be reshaped in terms of this sector. Because with autonomous ships, new risks arise due to cyber-attacks or software failures, which means the emergence of new types of insurance. In summary, this thesis aims to provide a brief summary of the current regulations in maritime law and to analyse the problems that the maritime sector is likely to face in the future and to propose solutions.