Aviation Terrorism with Particular Reference to the Air Carrier's Liability for Personal Damages Resulting from Hijackings Pursuant to Art. 17 of the Warsaw Convention

Master's Thesis from the year 1997 in the subject Law - Miscellaneous, grade: Distinction, Lancaster University (Law Department), language: English, abstract: Aviation terrorism is viewed as a serious problem that has spread drastically for the past three decades. The international community keeps observing that the frequency and intensity of terrorist attacks has increased. Civilian aircraft and civilian aviation facilities as well as the hostage-taking of passengers or the crew of an aircraft have become the major targets of terrorism. These alarming tendencies have induced the member states of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to adopt and ratify several international conventions, such as the Tokyo, The Hague and the Montreal Conventions.Although much has been done on the international level to cope with the spate of aviation terrorism, incidents, such as the attacks on the terminals in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985, or the actual hijacking of a Maltese airline on 9 June 1997 which was scheduled for a flight to Istanbul and diverted to the Cologne/Bonn Airport, recall that these terrorism threats could have happened everywhere and carried out against different targets. At the very beginning of aviation terrorism after World War II., the unlawful seizure of aircraft was rather used as a means for political asylum in an alien country. For instance, an aeroplane of the Eastern Air Line Electra was seized on 24 July 1961 by a Cuban citizen who was officially denied permission to Cuba. Such events significantly show that aviation terrorism has a global effect: No national boarders are safe enough to prevent terrorists from threatening human beings, as passengers and international communications at airports have now become the new targets of such attacks.Keeping these facts in mind, it is worth discussing how the well-established rules and principles of international law respond to the issue of the unlawful seizure of aircraft.