Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

Terrorism has become the nightmare of the modern world. The means by which terrorism manifests itself are as brutal as they are imaginative. They include the highjacking of aircraft, with United States flag carriers as prime targets. They include the shooting of passengers at airports, in cities like Rome and Vienna, and the bombing of hotels and restaurants, in cities like Berlin and Paris.

Terrorism is the symptom of a disease. It is the disease of the militarily weak, the politically frustrated, and the religiously fanatic. The Palestinians, the Catholic Irish, the Basques, the Kurds, and a hundred other tribes passionately embrace the natural law imperative of a national homeland. The Islamic Jihad heed the fundamentalist call of an angry God. The Red Army Fraction, the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other cells of anarchy aspire to a Marxist utopia. With the prospect of a political solution out of reach, they each suffer from the same malaise which inspires indiscriminate aggression.

Hijacking and other forms of aerial terrorism have developed as a means for the militarily weak to achieve political objectives at the expense of the innocent.' During the infancy of civil aviation, a passenger's principal concerns were the skill of the pilot and the condition of the aircraft. The past two decades have added a third-whether or not a fellow passenger intends to use the occasion to focus the media's attention on a revolutionary cause.' The hijacking of an aircraft is still among the most effective means of capturing a worldwide audience and escaping the consequences of the act.

Multilateral attempts to define the offense of hijacking and develop a cogent system of preventive international law have not yet satisfactorily deterred aerial hijacking. The United States has taken significant steps to promulgate domestic legislation to compliment the multilateral effort.

The international community hesitates to follow the more stringent posture of the United States because of the political overtones that are so much a part of aerial piracy. Aircraft hijacking is treated subjectively under a variety of social and political rubrics.' This means that, too often, there is a sympathetic nation willing to provide a safe haven for aerial terrorists.

This article reviews international and domestic law aimed at halting aircraft hijacking. It examines the international resolutions and conventions on aerial terrorism, discusses the merits and defects of each, and analyzes United States legislation addressing international and domestic problems related to aircraft hijacking. The article concludes that neither international nor domestic law will effectively deter aerial piracy without worldwide cooperation to strengthen airport security, to prosecute terrorists, and to impose stiff sanctions on states which provide safe havens for hijackers.

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