Flying High
Back in 1994, the map of the world had just undergone its most radical redraw since World War II.
The Soviet Union’s breakup meant a dozen nascent countries were creating institutions from the ground up. A diminished Russia was reeling. Germany was newly reunified. Yugoslavia was struggling through an unfriendly five-way split. Namibia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia—all were recently independent. South Africa was emerging from Apartheid, keen to repair its image in the world. India and China had set their sights on greatly expanding their economic influence.
Trade, borders, travel, international law—all were in a state of flux. It was against this backdrop that the Aviation Working Group (AWG) was formed by Boeing and Airbus, at the request of the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT), to work with governments, industry and academics to create a treaty standardizing the laws governing financing and leasing of aircraft—vital elements to every country’s full participation in the rapidly shifting global economy.
That treaty, which became known as the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (CTC), has proven to be one of the most successful, innovative and influential agreements in international law.
With 77 signatories and growing, it has lowered the cost and increased the ease of financing and leasing of aircraft worldwide, while developing protocols that will be implemented in the not-too-distant future for railway equipment and space-based assets.
And today, on the verge of further expanding its reach to large mining, agricultural and construction assets with its new MAC protocol, the CTC is poised to become a more integral part of international trade and commerce than ever before.
If one person could be pointed to as a driving force behind the CTC, it’s Jeffrey Wool, secretary general of the AWG, UW professor of Global Business Law, Oxford senior research fellow and director of the Cape Town Convention Academic Project. The Academic Project is a joint undertaking between Ƶ and the University of Oxford Faculty of Law which recently held its 7th annual conference—a collaboration initiated by Wool and facilitated by his unique position as a faculty member of both institutions.
Wool was there on day one, and he continues as a driving force today.
“The original idea behind the Cape Town Convention was…to facilitate international trade and commerce,” Wool said. “The world is now more inter-connected than ever before, and the costs of doing business in an international setting relate very much to conflicts between and differences in law. Many large markets around the world needed to upgrade their legal and regulatory systems to provide the predictability and protections needed, and that treaty did precisely that.”
Wool said the CTC’s original and continued success is based partly on a number of important innovations baked into the treaty.
“First, it included true cooperation between developed and developing countries, academics and members of the professional sector,” Wool said. “Not many—if any—economic treaties have had that level of cooperation. The process was something that’s not been seen before or since.”
Secondly, Wool said, as opposed to most international commercial treaties that deal with contract law, the CTC dealt with global property rights, allowing it to tackle tough issues like corporate bankruptcies—issues that had often been off-limits in international law due to sovereignty concerns.
The last piece of innovation, one that’s even more innovative than was thought at the time, was the creation of a dynamic international property registry, Wool said.
Maintenance of that electronic registry, a living database of who-owns and finances-what for mobile equipment wherever it might be in the world, is core to the treaty.
“This summer that database surpassed one million registrations,” Wool said. “It’s one of the leading examples of electronic commerce we’ve seen to date. To have this type of high tech system at the center of a treaty had no precedence whatsoever. It was seen then as innovative—and has proved since to be even more innovative than we’d imagined.”
The CTC Academic Project maintains a central repository of all information generated worldwide that relates to the treaty, including all relevant case law and administrative action. The Project holds academic events and publishes an academic journal on the treaty. The most recent event, held in Oxford on September 12-13, 2018, attracted academic, industry, professional, and governmental leaders from around the world.
According to Kyle Brown, CTC Academic Project’s project manager, having a central point of contact for collecting and cataloging everything relating to the treaty has had a big impact in its ongoing successful understanding and implementation.
“The information in the repository comes from many sources around the world,” Brown said. “It would be very difficult if not impossible to go to all the original sources. It’s a great way to equal the playing field for knowledge. That makes it a stronger and more influential convention.”
Brown said the repository has also opened up an important area of access for Ƶ students to study international and transnational law, while the overall CTC Academic Project has been a cornerstone of Ƶ’s rapidly growing Global Business Law Institute.
“Jeffrey Wool has been instrumental in all this,” Brown said. “None of this would have happened without him. The cross-university cooperation with Oxford helped to immediately land a sense of seriousness and purpose to the project and build momentum. And since he was at a very early stage in his career when the process started, he remains a source of institutional knowledge about the CTC that no one else can duplicate as many of the other original participants retire.”
“Having two different major universities with different perspectives working together and cooperating [on the CTC Academic Project] has created a laboratory of information about international law and international business law,” Wool said. And by providing uniform and predictable rules worldwide, “There’s no doubt that the CTC has made doing business much easier in many jurisdictions, providing a wide range of economic benefits to all involved.”