The United Nations Convention on Negotiable Cargo Documents, also known as the Accra Convention, opened for signature at a ceremony in Accra, Ghana, on Monday, October 26, 2026, with 26 states signing as the first signatories . The signatories, in alphabetical protocol order, were: Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, China, Comoros, Côte d'Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Togo, United Republic of Tanzania, and Venezuela . Approximately 400 representatives from more than 60 countries and regions attended the signing ceremony .
The Convention was initiated and spearheaded by China and adopted by the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in December 2025 . Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Jiang Chenghua signed the Convention on behalf of the Chinese government. Jiang stated that this institutional innovation fills a gap in international rules and provides an international legal framework for financing transactions involving cross-border transport documents. It will effectively ease the financial pressure on enterprises engaged in international trade, reduce transaction costs in cross-border overland trade, and inject new momentum into the high-quality development of global trade .
The core innovation of the Convention lies in creating a "negotiable cargo document" applicable to all cross-border transport modes at the international rules level. For centuries, only the ocean bill of lading has functioned as a document of title, enabling traders to sell goods in transit or use them as collateral for bank financing. Comparable arrangements have been limited or unavailable for goods transported by road, rail, and air. The Convention changes this by establishing a harmonised legal framework that gives negotiable cargo documents covering road, rail, air, and sea transport the same legal weight as traditional ocean bills of lading, including in electronic form . This is expected to be particularly significant for landlocked countries and countries with vast continental territories, helping them integrate more efficiently into global supply chains .
Anna Joubin-Bret, Secretary of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), stated that the Convention would help reduce uncertainty, enhance resilience, facilitate trade finance, support trade digitalization, and improve the efficiency of international supply chains. She thanked the Chinese government for bringing the Convention project to UNCITRAL, noting that since its adoption by the UN General Assembly, "we have greatly benefited from China's steadfast support to the Convention and its efforts to promote the broader understanding of this framework" .
Ghana's Minister of Trade, Agribusiness and Industry, Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare, expressed pride in Ghana's role as the first signatory and announced that Ghana is already initiating immediate domestic legal reviews to ensure it is among the very first to deposit its instruments of ratification. She noted that the agreement would help address longstanding barriers preventing businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, from accessing finance using goods in transit as collateral. She cited estimates that road transport accounts for 80 to 90 percent of Africa's freight movement, while intra-African trade represented just 14.4 percent of the continent's total trade in 2024 .
The Convention will enter into force 180 days after the date of the deposit of the tenth instrument of ratification, acceptance, approval, or accession . Following the Accra signing ceremony, the Convention will remain open for signature at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. For logistics operators and EXIM businesses, the Convention's entry into force will mean that a single negotiable document can accompany goods across multiple modes of transport, reducing documentary complexity, enabling trade finance for overland and multimodal shipments, and supporting the digitalization of transport documents. The Convention has been described as a milestone in international commercial rules and a practical response to the growth of door-to-door and multimodal transport in global trade.