TEXT 7. RULES AND REGULATIONS

ICAO has a responsibility under its founding Chicago Convention of 1944 to promote the free, expeditious and unimpeded passage of an aircraft and its occupants across international boundaries, and «to prevent unnecessary delays to aircraft, crews, passengers and cargo, especially in the administration of the laws relating to immigration, quarantine, customs and clearance>>.

One of the most important measures included in a recent revision of Annex 9 to the Chicago Convention is the establishment of a goal to clear all passengers requiring normal inspection at major international airports within 45 minutes of disembarkation, regardless of aircraft size and sheduled arrival time.

The need to prevent terrorism and other forms of unlawful interference, and the requirement to suppress trafficking in narcotics and to guard against the rising tide of illegal immigrants (inadmissible persons) have led governments around the world to tighten security. This has resulted in additional checks and procedures and requires exhaustive methods of border control, rather than the sampling methods which had been effective in the past. It is clear that these new constraints, if taken to the extreme, could result in the paralysis of international air transport and completely nullify ICAO's facilitation programme unless new methodologies are adopted to effect the necessary controls.

Among the new methods and techniques that have been adopted to cope with these new challenges are technologically advanced screening equipment and processes. These include metal detectors, x-ray scanners, bar-code baggage scanners (for passenger baggage reconciliation), mass spectroscopy, chemiluminescence and low-energy neutron bombardment for detection of narcotics, weapons and other restricted items. The prime object of such procedures is aviation security.

The prime object of another technological advance - the machine readable passport (MRP) - is improved facilitation through rapid ma­chine clearance, instantaneous verification and recording of personal data. But there are also major security benefits: the MRP makes it pos­sible to match rapidly the identity of travelers against lists of undesirable orpotentially dangerous persons, and the document itself offers strong safeguards against alterations, forgery or counterfeit.