A competitive indirect chemiluminescent enzyme immunoassay (ic-CLEIA) has been developed for the determination of chloramphenicol (CAP) residues in shrimp. After the optimisation of four physico-chemical parameters, i.e. incubation time, concentration of Tween-20, concentration of PBS and its pH, the method developed gave a limit of detection of 0.01 ng/ml and a detection range from 0.03 ng/ml to 23.7 ng/ml, with an ED<sub>50</sub> of 0.47 ng/ml. The developed method has been validated on spiked shrimp samples in terms of precision (intra- and interassay coefficient variations of less than 10% and 15%, respectively), and of accuracy (mean recovery from 95% to 123%). All these parameters being better than those of the ELISA method which is widely used to detect chloramphenicol, it may be suggested that the CLEIA method can be used to detect aquatic samples instead of ELISA.