India’s Admiralty (Jurisdiction and Settlement of Maritime Claims) Act, 2017, consolidated what had been a fragmented, colonial-era admiralty jurisdiction spread across a handful of High Courts into a single modern statute. Nearly a decade in, a run of 2025–26 High Court rulings — most notably the Gujarat High Court’s Division Bench decision in Segal Ships (P) Ltd. v. M.V. Tulsi Sagar — is now sharpening exactly how much discretion a court retains once a maritime claimant establishes a prima facie case for arrest.
The Core Dispute: Arrest Versus Undertaking
In Segal Ships, a single judge had accepted an undertaking from the vessel owner — a promise not to sail out of the court’s jurisdiction — in place of arresting two of five vessels against which a maritime claim had been established. On appeal, the Division Bench overturned that approach and directed the arrest of all five vessels, holding squarely that an undertaking is not security, and that a promise to remain within jurisdiction cannot substitute for the arrest of a vessel once a prima facie maritime claim is shown. The ruling reiterates a foundational admiralty principle: arrest exists to secure the claimant’s ability to recover against the res — the vessel itself, proceeded against in rem — not merely to secure the ship owner’s good behaviour.
Why “Actions In Rem” Make Admiralty Law Distinctive
Admiralty jurisdiction is one of the few areas of Indian civil procedure built around proceeding directly against property rather than against a person — the vessel itself is, in a sense, the defendant. This is what makes an “undertaking not to sail” doctrinally unsatisfactory as a substitute for arrest: an undertaking binds the person who gives it, but the whole logic of an action in rem is that the claimant’s security should not depend on the ship owner’s continued cooperation or solvency. A string of subsequent rulings through 2026 — including arrests of foreign vessels at Visakhapatnam and Kandla for unpaid management fees and disputed possession — have applied this reasoning consistently, reinforcing arrest as the default remedy rather than an exceptional one.
Foreign Vessels and Territorial Submission
A related principle running through this year’s rulings is that a foreign-flagged vessel entering Indian territorial waters voluntarily submits to Indian admiralty jurisdiction for claims arising in connection with its presence — a straightforward but consequential application of territorial jurisdiction that gives Indian claimants real leverage against foreign shipowners who might otherwise be difficult to sue in their home jurisdictions.
The Interface With Arbitration and Insolvency
Two adjacent doctrinal questions are actively being worked out in the courts: whether a vessel can still be arrested in an action in rem even where the underlying commercial dispute is covered by an arbitration agreement (the emerging answer is generally yes, with arrest treated as a security measure independent of the merits forum), and how admiralty claims interact with a shipowner’s insolvency proceedings under the IBC, where competing claimants may be racing between two entirely different statutory regimes.
Why This Matters Beyond Shipping Practice
For a student with an interest in international and maritime law, this line of cases is a compact illustration of how India’s post-2017 admiralty statute is still being filled in by judicial interpretation — procedural questions the Act’s drafters left open (what counts as adequate security, how undertakings interact with arrest, weekend and vacation-bench emergency jurisdiction) are being resolved case by case, in real time, in a way that makes current High Court admiralty rulings essential reading rather than settled background law.
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