2009 Montreal Conventions (Third-Party Damage on the Ground)
Two ICAO conventions meant to replace the 1952 Rome convention for damage caused on the ground by an aircraft, one for ordinary accidents and the other for hijackings and attacks, never applied for lack of ratifications.
The 1999 Montreal Convention governs the carrier's liability to its passengers, but not to people on the ground. That ground was covered by the 1952 Rome convention, which few states ratified and whose limits were seen as derisory. After September 11, 2001, ICAO set out to address the case of a hijacked aircraft destroying buildings: the operator's unlimited liability, which it could not insure at that level, threatened airlines' survival. Two texts came out of it. The first imposes strict liability for ordinary accidents. The second targets acts of unlawful interference: it caps the operator's debt according to aircraft weight and provides for an international fund, financed by a levy on each passenger, above that cap. The problem they tried to solve, pooling aviation terrorism risk across airlines, remains open: that risk is borne today by AVN 52 extensions and, as a last resort, by governments.
Adopted on May 2, 2009 at the close of the diplomatic conference held in Montreal from April 20 to May 2, the two conventions each require thirty-five ratifications, and the one on unlawful interference also requires the states parties to account for 750 million departing passengers a year; ICAO still lists both as not yet in force.
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