Lawful and unlawful seizure of aircraft

Professor Sundberg attempts to show that there is a very important reservation made when the word “unlawful” was included in the title of the antihijacking convention entered into at The Hague in 1970, and that the avenues into which it leads are largely unexplored. With the aid of a number of litigated hijacking cases he shows that the doctrine of justification—one of the general defences admitted in all penal‐law systems—also addresses itself to matters occurring abroad, including foreign penal‐law systems, and that this doctrine is sufficiently broad to provide good defenses in a great many hijacking cases simply as a side effect of what foreign policy is pursued. Professor Sundberg ends with the pessimistic note that conventions probably cannot be drafted without such a reservation simply because governments cannot achieve by convention what they have not succeeded to achieve at home by statute.