베이징 항공테러협약

The Beijing Convention on aviation terrorism: A response to new and emerging threats to civil aviation

The September 11 attacks of 2001 prompted the International Civil Aviation Organization(ICAO) to address new and emerging threats to international civil aviation. In the wake of the attacks, the ICAO began a review of the existing aviation security conventions that culminated in a diplomatic conference in Beijing, China. One of the treaties adopted in Beijing is the Convention on the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Relating to International Civil Aviation (Beijing Convention). The purpose of this paper is to find how the Beijing Convention responds to the new and emerging threats. The preparatory works of the Beijing Convention and the study of its provisions show that the regulatory regime established by the Convention is more comprehensive than the existing aviation security conventions. Such comprehensiveness seems to be manifested in three points. First, the Convention has expanded the list of criminalized acts, and the newly added crimes include, inter alia, use of aircraft as weapons, chemical, biological and radioactive attacks, and acts of organizing or directing offences specified in the Convention. Second, the nature of the acts added as new crimes under the Convention resulted in the need for additional jurisdictional grounds, and the Convention introduced jurisdictional grounds which were not found in the previous aviation security conventions. Included in the new jurisdictional grounds are the nationality of the offender and the nationality of the victim. Third, the Convention has incorporated certain provisions commonly found in the more recent counterterrorism conventions concluded in the UN system. This means that, when compared with the previous aviation security conventions, the Beijing Convention has not only the characteristics of the aviation security regime but also it has the characteristics of the broader and general counter-terrorism regime.