PROBLEMS OF LEGAL REGULATORY EFFECTIVENESS FOR FREIGHT FORWARDING SERVICES IN LIGHT OF LEGISLATIVE REFORMS

Abstract

The article examines the novelties introduced by Federal Law No. 140-FZ of June 7, 2025, into the legal regulation of freight forwarding activities. The adoption of this law was driven by a sharp growth in the cargo transportation services market in the absence of mechanisms preventing the movement of items and substances withdrawn from civil circulation or subject to restricted circulation. At the same time, this law contains a number of systemic flaws that reduce its private law effectiveness; in particular, it has created a conflict between the forwarder’s public duty to disclose information about the cargo and his private law duty to maintain confidentiality. This necessitates a reconsideration of the reform of freight forwarding services, including taking into account the balance of private and public interests as one of the key means of ensuring the effectiveness of legal regulation of transport activities. The purpose of the study is to assess the impact of the 2025 reform on the legal nature of the freight forwarding contract, its functional role in the system of transport obligations, and the mechanisms for ensuring contractual discipline. To achieve this goal, the study employs formal-legal (reconstructing the content of Federal Law No. 140-FZ of June 7, 2025, and correlating it with the norms of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and Federal Law No. 87-FZ of June 30, 2003), comparative-legal (comparing the previous and new versions of the regulation of the forwarding contract and administrative liability), as well as systemic-structural (examining the forwarding contract in conjunction with other transport and organizational contracts and with the state digital infrastructure – GIS for Electronic Transport Documents, the GosLog platform, and the register of forwarders) research methods. Results: the freight forwarding contract is transformed from a predominantly private law instrument into a complex contract with a pronounced public law burden: a register of forwarders, mandatory electronic document management, data localization, and turnover fines are introduced. The reform strengthens contractual discipline through a multi-level system of incentives and sanctions but simultaneously creates problems with the enforceability of certain forwarder duties, conflicts between the confidentiality of commercial information and public security interests, and shifts the focus of regulation towards public control, which poses the challenge of doctrinal understanding of new models for balancing private and public interests.