International Agreements and Organizations — Page 28, Lesson 45

Let’s start with the big picture, because this is the foundation of the whole subject. There is no world parliament, no global legislative body. So legally, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as international law. That’s the first thing to get straight. What we call international law is really a set of arrangements made at conventions of States — meetings held for the purpose of reaching consensus between States. At those meetings, States agree on rules to regulate activities that affect more than one State, through common agreement. Now, here’s the crucial limitation. Those agreements are not legally enforceable on their own, because there is no global police force. Every State is entitled to its sovereignty — and I’ll come back to that definition in a moment. So how does an international agreement ever become binding? Through a two-step process. The national delegation to the convention takes the text of the agreement — including any codicils, appendices, protocols, and so on — and places it before the national parliament, or the national legislative body, as a proposal to make that text the law of that State. That first step is called adoption. Then, once the parliament actually enacts it, that’s ratification. So adoption is the proposal, ratification is the formal making of it into national law. The result is that what was agreed internationally becomes locally enforceable law in the States concerned. And here’s the practical consequence: an offence committed against such law would be triable and punishable under national penal legislation in any Contracting State anywhere in the world. So the enforcement is national, not global — but the reach is international, because any Contracting State can try and punish the offence. Now let’s define sovereignty, because it’s central. Sovereignty is the right of a State to exercise supreme authority over its own territory and affairs, free from external control. In this context, it means no State can be forced to comply with an international agreement; it only becomes bound when it voluntarily adopts and ratifies it into its own law. That leads us directly to territorial airspace. The application of national law is only applicable to the territory over which that State has jurisdiction. In aviation, the extent of that jurisdiction is limited laterally — that is, horizontally — by the lateral limits of territorial airspace, but it is unlimited vertically. That’s an interesting situation when you think about satellites and spacecraft, because the vertical limit is not defined — it just goes up without end. Now, the lateral territorial limits. These have been agreed internationally, but only where such a limit is not coincident with a land boundary. In other words, where a border follows a coastline or a sea boundary, the States have had to agree on where the limit lies. Let me give you the two examples from the text. Switzerland is easy, because it is land-locked — its airspace is simply defined by its land borders. The UK, however, is different. Its limit is defined by the limit of territorial waters — and that’s where the excerpt cuts off, so we’ll pick that up next.