The issue in this case was whether French courts have jurisdiction on the merits of a claim filed by a Norwegian national employed on board a ship flying the Norwegian flag. The claimant arrested the ship in France to secure their employment claim and could prove, as a matter of fact, that they had their habitual domicile or residence in France regardless of the place where they performed their work on board the ship and regardless of the country where they started working for their employer/shipowner.

Held: Article 7.1.a of the Arrest Convention 1952, which, by reason of its specificity, aims to apply to maritime litigation, provides that the courts of the country in which the arrest of the vessel was made shall have jurisdiction to determine the case upon its merits, in particular when the claimant has his habitual residence or principal place of business in the country in which the arrest was made.

X produced in Court numerous exhibits, including a Norwegian notice of move to France from 7 January 2008, the deed of purchase of their flat in Nice on 11 November 2011 for which no document establishes that it was no longer their property when the arrest of the ship was effected, French tax notices for the years 2016-2019, EDF and Orange invoices sent to them in 2018 in Nice, bank statements showing numerous payments in the Nice region during 2018 and certificates of residence or domicile delivered by the Nice City Hall on 26 February 2018, 5 December 2018 and 5 June 2019 which sufficiently establish, in the eyes of the Court, that when the vessel was arrested and then the case was referred to the Labour Court in August 2018, their usual residence or their main place of business, as notions of pure fact, were in Nice.

The administrative Norwegian document translated by the respondents whereby X would have been declared to reside in Norway from 8 May 2018 demonstrates insufficiently, in the absence of any other document of this tenor, a concrete place of business or real and main centres of interest, notably professional interest, in Norway at the time of the arrest.

With regard to this mere conventional criterion, the jurisdiction of French courts must be retained. When it comes to a dispute arising from the performance of a maritime employment contract on a foreign-flagged vessel, it is appropriate, in the absence of convincing evidence that X was domiciled elsewhere than in Nice at the beginning of the proceeding and having regard to the fact that, charged of the command of a vessel at sea, they did no work in a determined company or establishment, to retain the jurisdiction of the Nice Labour Court by application of arts L 1411-1 and R 1412-1 of the French Labour Code.