GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Airline companies’ organization IATA called Tuesday on governments “to close legal loopholes that allow unruly passengers to escape law enforcement for serious offences committed on board aircraft.”

The group is calling for action on the eve of governments holding a diplomatic meeting in Montreal to revise the Tokyo Convention to make it easier to prosecute what IATA calls the small minority of unruly passengers. IATA argues that closing legal loopholes would act as a deterrent.

“At the moment there are too many examples of people getting away with serious breaches of social norms that jeopardize the safety of flights because local law enforcement authorities do not have the power to take action.”

Airplane leasing is part of the problem, but the larger problem is one of jurisdiction.

“The Tokyo Convention was negotiated in 1963 and it gives jurisdiction over offenses committed onboard aircraft to the state of registration of the aircraft. With modern leasing arrangements, the state of aircraft registry is often neither the state in which the aircraft lands nor the state of the operator. This limits the practicality of enforcement and consequently the options available to mitigate disruptive behaviors. For this reason, the airline industry supports proposals for jurisdiction to be extended to both the state in which the aircraft lands and the state in which the operator is located.

“‘Airlines are doing all they can to prevent and manage unruly passenger incidents, but this needs to be backed up with effective law enforcement. Reports of unruly behavior are on the

rise. The Tokyo Convention was not originally designed to address unruly behavior and there is a great deal of uncertainty amongst carriers as to what actions crew can take to manage incidents in the air. And if the aircraft lands in a state other than where the aircraft was registered,

local authorities are not always able to prosecute,’ [says] Tony Tyler, IATA’s director general and CEO.”