The United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) approved a draft convention on July 14, 2025, to extend negotiable cargo documents (NCDs) to all modes of transport—rail, road, air, and sea—addressing a significant legal gap in international commerce.

This convention supports a transition from traditional paper-based documents to digital records, allowing for a single electronic record across multiple transport modes, which enhances reliability and efficiency for global trade.

The new legal framework establishes harmonized provisions for negotiable documents of title across all transport modes, facilitating seamless transfers of goods in multimodal shipments.

Beate Czerwenka, Chair of Working Group VI, emphasized that this convention is crucial for empowering small businesses and fostering a more efficient, resilient, and digitalized trade ecosystem.

James Hookham from the Global Shippers Forum praised the convention as a major step forward, especially for shippers in developing economies, by providing greater legal certainty for multimodal bills of lading.

Negotiable cargo documents enable goods to be traded or used as collateral during transit, significantly improving access to trade finance for micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and businesses in landlocked regions.

The convention aims to bolster legal certainty and support global trade facilitation initiatives like the UN Digital Compact and the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement, benefiting freight forwarders and logistics providers.

Jun Xu of the ICC Banking Commission highlighted that the convention would help secure goods for exporters pre-payment and increase trade financing capacity for SMEs by allowing NCDs to be used as collateral.

After three years of collaborative work among diplomats, legal experts, and trade professionals, the draft convention was finalized during UNCITRAL's 58th session.

The draft convention will be forwarded to the UN General Assembly for consideration and potential adoption in late 2025, with all Member States encouraged to support this historic move.

Andrea Tang from FIATA described the approval as a pivotal moment for international trade, creating a unified legal framework for negotiable cargo documents in both paper and electronic formats.

Previously, only maritime transport benefited from widely accepted negotiable documents like bills of lading, while other modes used non-negotiable documents, posing challenges for MSMEs and complicating multimodal trade.