All Power to the Pilot

One of the trickiest and most disputed questions in the nebulous world of international law is legal jurisdiction in the air. If a Swiss citizen slips arsenic into his wife's martini on a British airliner flying from Frankfurt to Paris, which country should prosecute--Great Britain because the plane is British, France because the plane landed there after the crime, Switzerland since Swiss citizens were involved, or Germany in whose airspace the crime was committed?

In the age of jets, the answer is still unclear and the problem increasingly acute. To date, in the absence of international agreement, offenders have been prosecuted by arrangements (sometimes of questionable legality) between the individual countries involved, or have gone scot-free because no court could decide on jurisdiction.

Last week in Munich, legal experts of 27 nations, gathered by the U.N.-sponsored International Civil Aviation Organization, were writing an authoritative law of the air. Basically, the new code's most important provision would give priority of jurisdiction to the country in which the aircraft was registered, though under certain conditions the nation in whose airspace the crime was committed might claim the right to prosecute. The new law would also give pilots authority equivalent to that of ships' captains on the high seas. They could seize and hold suspects in the air and, when necessary, deputize passengers and crew members to assist them.

Though convention draft must still be accepted by the I.C.A.O.'s general assembly next year, and ratified by each contracting country as a matter of treaty, legal experts who have been working on the problem since 1947 were delighted with the speed they have made so far, compared to the centuries in which maritime law evolved.

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