International Aviation Institute Director, Brian F. Havel, recently addressed the fourth conference on the Cape Town Convention on aircraft corporate finance at the University of Oxford, UK. Professor Havel, who has addressed three of the four Cape Town conferences on issues relating to the relationship between the Convention and public international law, spoke on how the Cape Town Convention combines both public and private international law features.
In his remarks, Professor Havel placed special emphasis on how the convention gives private creditors a right of self-help that effectively bypasses the kind of court-ordered enforcement of remedies that we see in normal contract situations. This self-help process, in his view, fulfills Cape Town’s primary objective of “making public functions private.” The convention, in other words, uses the strength of the international treaty system to make private transactions in the global aircraft finance sector more uniform, reliable, and effective.
The conference, held annually at Oxford, is sponsored by the Cape Town Academic Project, a consortium that includes Oxford, the University of Washington School of Law, and the Boeing Company.