Whose Law, Whose Health? The Brazilian Cruise Ship Seafarer between the Maritime Labour Convention, the Law of the Flag and the Unified Health System

A Brazilian worker recruited in Brazil to serve aboard a foreign flagged cruise ship occupies a position that three legal orders claim and none fully governs. The Maritime Labour Convention, 2006 promises medical care on board and ashore, shipowner liability for sickness and injury, repatriation at no cost and progressive social security protection, but it allocates most of these duties to the flag State, which in an open registry is frequently an administrative abstraction. Brazilian labour law, after the cancellation of Precedent 207 of the Superior Labour Court and the consolidation of a new line of authority in 2023 and 2024, now applies Brazilian protective legislation to these contracts whenever it is more favourable, on the combined strength of Law 7.064/1982 and the centre of gravity of the employment relationship. The Unified Health System receives the worker on return as it receives any resident, under the universal guarantee of Article 196 of the Federal Constitution, without notification, without cost recovery and without any record that the morbidity it treats was produced in a transnational employment relationship. This article argues that the resulting gap is not an accident of implementation but the predictable output of three unreconciled conflict rules: the law of the flag, the most significant relationship combined with the more favourable norm, and territorial universality. It further argues that the suture point is narrower than the literature assumes. Brazil already licenses, certifies and keeps records on the seafarer recruitment and placement services operating in its territory. A health repatriation protocol, built as a notification duty attached to that existing regime and linked to the port State disembarkation obligation introduced by the 2022 amendments to the Convention, would close the evidentiary gap without new treaty making. Preprint: author's manuscript, not peer reviewed.