. New arrest convention The arrest of ships has always been a sensitive subject for shipowners. A ship is, after all, the owner's principal asset, and if deprived of its use the trading and other losses can be enormous. The need for international uniformity in the law of arrest has therefore always been paramount, and ICS has participated actively in the several years of talks on the preparation of a new Convention on the Arrest of Ships. These discussions culminated in a two-week UN/IMO Conference held in Geneva in March 1999 to adopt a final text. The new Convention is a reasonably balanced instrument. On the plus side, it contains a number of improvements on its predecessor, the 1952 Convention on Arrest, such as explicit provisions on counter-security. But it has also expanded the list of maritime claims and introduced a right of multiple arrest, decisions which the industry can only view with concern. Taken as a whole, however, the new Convention does not represent a radical departure from the 1952 Convention, which has achieved widespread international support. It is therefore impossible to predict at this stage whether it will be sufficiently attractive to states to gain early acceptance. .