Part III - Dispute Settlement

Summary

This article aims to present the dispute settlement mechanism established in Chapter XVIII of the Chicago Convention. To this end, the article will analyze how the Council could resolve a potential dispute involving a defense of sustainable development. For this exercise, purely hypothetical cases will be analyzed, in which the European Union (EU) decides to unilaterally implement its emissions trading scheme in the field of aviation or in which the EU or a major aviation state applies the GHS emissions scheme mandated by the ICAO Assembly in 2016 to a state that considers it should be exempted. These cases will serve as hypotheticals to consider whether the dispute settlement mechanism set out at Article 84 of the Chicago Convention could serve to resolve such a dispute. The ICAO dispute settlement mechanism has been criticized many times in the ICAO’s history. In fact, the five disputes brought under the present article have each been resolved through diplomatic channels, involving the good offices of the President of the ICAO Council. Therefore, despite the difficulties presented by the procedure and the peculiarity of the EU representation at the ICAO, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that a potential dispute with respect to sustainable development will most likely be resolved the same way as has been done previously.