Edward McWhinney

This is essentially a collection of essays that detail progress in attempts to develop an international convention against aerial piracy, more familiarly known as hijacking. The push for the convention followed on from the hijacking and destruction of international airliners in Egypt and Jordan in the early 1970's. The essays are really contemporaneous with the development of the argument for how to construct such a convention, in fact they are largely submissions put to the bodies given the task of building the convention. So there is no reflection here, no looking back at what was achieved (and not achieved) or synthesis of viewpoints. But for all of that it is a fascinating exercise to watch how a simple concept becomes incredibly subtle, shifting and difficult when you try to pin down a 'sensible' viewpoint into a precise legal definition of responsibilities. Once upon a time hijacking was done by people escaping from Cuba or the Soviet block and that was 'ok', then radicals started hijacking US aircraft to Cuba, and that was not so ok, and then extremists started hijacking planes into the Middle East and destroying them and that was apparently a completely different thing. But as this series of essays shows, when reduced to legal absolutes there was either going to be no circumstance where hijacking was 'pardonable', or no realistically fair international convention. More than anything else this book illustrates, in a small package, how difficult it is to develop international law. Quite easy reading, but it calls out for supplementary reading on where the law actually went after this.… (meer)