Nigeria Cape Town Convention Moot Court Competition

International aviation law took its modern shape with the 1944 Chicago Convention, which established the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the principle that every state has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. The Chicago framework was supplemented by the 'freedoms of the air' and by bilateral and, increasingly, open-skies agreements that govern traffic rights, capacity, and market access between states. Liability for passengers and cargo evolved separately through the Warsaw Convention of 1929 and its successor, the 1999 Montreal Convention, which modernized rules on carrier liability, documentation, and compensation for international carriage by air. Alongside the public-law architecture, a body of private international air law has grown to address aircraft finance, registration, leasing, and the cross-border enforcement of security interests, culminating in the 2001 Cape Town Convention and its Aircraft Protocol. Safety, security, environmental, and competition concerns have added further layers: ICAO's CORSIA scheme addresses aviation emissions; conventions on unlawful interference (Tokyo 1963, Hague 1970, Montreal 1971, Beijing 2010) address hijacking and sabotage; and disputes over subsidies, route access, and overflight rights continue to test the system. Today, aviation law faces pressure from rapid technological change — unmanned aircraft systems, supersonic and commercial space flight, cybersecurity threats — and from geopolitical fragmentation, including airspace closures arising from the war in Ukraine and tensions over overflight rights in the Gulf and East Asia. Harmonizing national regulation with ICAO standards, while balancing sovereignty, safety, decarbonization, and consumer protection, remains the central challenge.

The Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment, signed in Cape Town in 2001 under the joint auspices of UNIDROIT and ICAO, was designed to solve a long-standing problem in asset-based finance: high-value mobile equipment — aircraft, railway rolling stock, and space assets — routinely crosses borders, but national insolvency and security-interest regimes diverged sharply, making creditors' rights unpredictable and financing more expensive. The Convention, together with its Aircraft Protocol, creates a uniform international legal framework for the creation, registration, priority, and enforcement of 'international interests' in aircraft objects, supported by a centralized International Registry operated under ICAO supervision. The regime offers creditors clear default remedies — including the right to take possession, deregister, and export aircraft — and provides insolvency rules, most notably the much-debated 'Alternative A' under Article XI of the Aircraft Protocol, which mirrors the predictable creditor protections of U.S. Bankruptcy Code §1110. States that ratify and make qualifying declarations earn discounts under the OECD Aircraft Sector Understanding, reducing the cost of export credit for their airlines. The Convention has been widely adopted, with more than eighty contracting states and ratification by major manufacturing and operating jurisdictions. Implementation, however, has been uneven. Disputes have arisen where domestic courts or regulators have impeded timely repossession or deregistration — notably in cases involving Russian airlines after the 2022 sanctions and lease terminations, and in earlier proceedings involving carriers in India, Brazil, and elsewhere. Nigeria, an early African ratifier and home to the Practice Directions on Cape Town Convention matters, has become an important test bed for whether the treaty's promises of predictability and creditor certainty can be realized in practice.

Cross-border insolvency law addresses what happens when a debtor with assets, creditors, or operations in more than one jurisdiction becomes insolvent. Historically, states applied a territorial approach — each forum administering only the assets within its borders — which produced parallel proceedings, asset grabs, and inconsistent outcomes. The modern trend, championed by UNCITRAL's 1997 Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and reinforced by the 2018 Model Law on Recognition and Enforcement of Insolvency-Related Judgments, is 'modified universalism': a main proceeding in the debtor's centre of main interests (COMI), with cooperation, recognition, and coordinated relief in other jurisdictions. The Model Law has been enacted in over fifty states, including the United States (Chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code), the United Kingdom, Japan, South Africa, and several African and Latin American jurisdictions. The European Union operates its own regime under the recast Insolvency Regulation (2015/848), and major financial centres have developed specialist restructuring tools — English schemes of arrangement and restructuring plans, U.S. Chapter 11, Singapore's enhanced scheme regime, and the Netherlands' WHOA — that are increasingly used by foreign debtors. Sector-specific instruments such as the Cape Town Convention's Alternative A interact with these regimes by carving out predictable treatment for secured creditors of aircraft objects. Contemporary challenges include determining COMI for digital and multinational corporate groups, recognizing restructuring plans that bind dissenting foreign creditors, coordinating insolvencies of state-linked or sanctioned entities, and managing the wave of distress following the COVID-19 pandemic, high interest rates, and sovereign debt strains in emerging markets. For jurisdictions like Nigeria, which adopted a new insolvency framework under CAMA 2020, aligning domestic law with international standards is central to attracting investment and resolving distress in airlines and other cross-border businesses.