March 27, 2015
The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 in the French Alps on Tuesday opens another chapter in the macabre story of international aviation that began a year ago with the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and seemed to reach its tragic peak in July with the downing of that same airliner’s Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. The loss of AirAsia Flight 8501 in December was no less tragic, though it failed to capture sustained public attention. Breaking reports that Flight 9525 was brought down intentionally by the aircraft’s copilot, 28-year old German citizen Andreas Lubitz, has sparked an international outcry and a full criminal investigation by French officials. In the end, who will pay and why are questions that are already addressed under international law.
Assuming that Lubitz acted alone and without connection to any criminal or terrorist enterprise, the criminal dimension of the tragedy is likely a nonissue. A series of international treaties signed in the 1960s and 70s grant the French state jurisdiction over the crash, though without a surviving culprit, their substantive provisions, and any supplementary criminal sanctions available under French law, won’t come into play.
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