This was an appeal brought by a number of seafarers in respect of their wages claims. The Court of first instance held that it lacked jurisdiction to hear the wages claims, as this was an issue that fell to be determined by the labour courts, rather than by the commercial courts. The seafarers appealed to the Provincial Court.

Held: Appeal dismissed.

The purpose of this appeal is limited to a question of a strictly legal nature, which is whether these claims, derived from the amount of the salary of the crew of the ship Sunny Jane, falls within the civil jurisdiction of the courts, and within this, the jurisdiction of the Commercial Court because of its maritime law specialisation, or, if on the contrary, as the Judge below understood, the issue belongs to the labour jurisdictional order.

The relationship that unites the shipowner with the crew of the ships it operates is of the nature of labour, although the 1885 Commercial Code (CCom) contains certain rules relating to salary, such as arts 644-646 and 580. In other words, the so-called shipping employment contract and the legal relationships arising from it, required for the shipping company's business activity, belong to the aforementioned branch of our legal system and, as such, can be overseen by the social jurisdiction of the labour courts.

This is not an obstacle for the salaries of the crew to enjoy certain privileges in the field of maritime law, whose antecedents date back to the first medieval compilations of usages and customs of this nature, which were echoed in our Code of Commerce, as they were in the French, Italian and German Codes. Thus art 580 CCom provides that, in any judicial sale of a ship for payment of creditors, they will have priority in the order listed, in which the maritime liens in favour of the Public Treasury take first place, and in the sixth place are 'wages due to the captain and crew on their last voyage'.

The international recognition of such maritime liens was not long in coming, and in this way they were established in art 2.2 of the MLM Convention 1926 ('[c]laims arising out of the contract of engagement of the master, crew and other persons hired on board'), art 4.1.1 of the MLM Convention 1967 ('wages and other sums due to the master, officers and other members of the vessel's complement in respect of their employment on the vessel') and in art 4.1.a of the MLM Convention 1993 ('claims for wages and other sums due to the master, officers and other members of the vessel's complement in respect of their employment on the vessel, including costs of repatriation and social insurance contributions payable on their behalf'), with a progressive extension of the maritime lien from the captain's and crew's salaries to all claims resulting from the employment contract.

Now, it is one thing that a claim enjoys a maritime lien in relation to the ship, and another thing as to what is the competent jurisdiction to decide on its recognition and quantification.

Article 7.2 of the Arrest Convention 1952 expressly regulates the situation where the court within whose jurisdiction the ship has been arrested does not have jurisdiction to hear the merits, and, in this case, deals with claims for wages derived from an employment relationship, which is a matter for the labour jurisdiction. For its part, the MLM Convention 1926 provides in art 16 that '[n]othing in the foregoing provisions shall be deemed to affect in any way the competence of tribunals, modes of procedure or methods of execution authorized by the national law', in order to safeguard the jurisdiction of the courts, the procedure and the enforcement channels organised by national laws.

For all these reasons, the judgment below was correct in so far as it considers that a wages claim is a pecuniary claim in the nature of labour and, as such, residing in that jurisdictional order, without discussing whether or not it enjoys a maritime lien, or the priority that comes from the recognition of such a claim when proceeding, where appropriate, to the sale of the vessel.