The Revision of the Warsaw Convention

Abstract

At its seventeenth session held in February-March 1970, the Legal Committee of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted the final text of new draft rules governing the liability of the air carrier in respect of the international carriage of passengers by air. Since 1965, ICAO has been working on the preparation of these draft rules which, when ultimately adopted by a diplomatic conference, signed and ratified, will constitute a farreaching revision of the provisions of the widely accepted Convention for the Unification of Certain Rules relating to International Carriage by Air (Warsaw 1929) as amended by the Hague Protocol of 1955. In previous notes in thisYearbookthe writer summarized discussions on the Warsaw rules in the international aviation community from late 1965, when the United States of America filed its notification of denunciation of the Warsaw Convention, until early 1968, when the ICAO Council decided to hand over the task of revision to the ICAO Legal Committee. The latter body having finished its work on revision early in March 1970, the ICAO Council lost no time in convening a diplomatic conference for February-March 1971. This conference will have the task of preparing and adopting the definitive instrument revising the Warsaw Convention as amended by the Hague Protocol.