Row over compensation for plane crash victims

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

ISLAMABAD: Ijazur Rehman lost his 34-year-old brother-in-law, Naveed Chaudhry, in the ill-fated Airblue plane crash and he now refuses to deal with the airline management.
“We will seek justice from the country's higher courts as the compensation provided by the airline is too low and not in accordance with the international laws,” he said, adding that his family lost “an important bread-earner of the family”.

He claims that a senior official of the airline informed him that Airblue would provide one million rupees as compensation. And he has decided to seek legal recourse.

He is not the only one. Reportedly some other relatives of the victims of the ill-fated flight have also decided to take the airline to court to seek compensation which is their right under international law.
They allege that Airblue is not following international convention on compensation from the airline to the third party, Dawn has learnt.

Their misgivings make sense in the context of what Civil Aviation Authority and Airblue say. Both, according to an earlier interview of Chief Operating
Officer and Chairman of Airblue Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, will be involved in finalising the compensation amount.
However, the airline’s General Manager Marketing, Raheel Ahmed, told Dawn that the final decision was yet to be made: “There is no final word from the airline over the compensation of the passengers. At the moment, we are still collecting the data of the relatives of the victims.”

Mr Ahmed claimed that international law would be followed to decide the compensation. Now contrast this with the statement of the director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority, Air Commodore (retd) Junaid Amin. Admitting that negotiations were on, he said: “All we can say is that the compensation will be around Rs1 million.”

But when asked if this amount would correspond with international civil aviation rules and regulations, he said: “The Montreal convention will be followed. I can assure you that compensation will be according to the rules.”

In an interview that Mr Abbasi gave in the first week of August, he too said that each domestic passenger was covered for one million rupees though he added that “this was not final” and that PIA had paid two million rupees to each family in the 2006 Fokker crash.

But legal experts agree that the international law provides for compensation higher than one million rupees. Ahmar Bilal Sufi, a renowned international legal expert, told Dawn: “Pakistan is a signatory to the Chicago Convention 1944 and according to this there is no limit of the compensation that can be claimed from the air carrier in case of a crash.”

He conceded that domestic law in this regard was missing though international law did apply. “There is great need of composite legislation in Pakistan in the aviation industry which can make them [air carriers] answerable to passengers.”

Another legal expert, Mohidullah Khan, said that Pakistan is signatory to the Montreal Convention of 1999. The convention, he said, had introduced a uniform legal framework to govern air carrier’s liability in the event of damage caused to passengers, baggage or goods.

The regulation, he said, applied to domestic or international flights. The clause of the convention, according to him, reads as: “The principle of the air carrier's unlimited civil liability in the event of bodily injury; this splits into two tiers: a first tier of strict carrier liability for damages of up to 100 000 SDRs (special drawing rights, as defined by the International Monetary Fund, i.e. around EUR 135, 000 or about Rs15.2 million). In excess of that amount, a second tier of liability based on the presumed fault of the carrier, which the latter may avoid only by proving that it was not at fault (the burden of proof is on the carrier).”

It is noteworthy that in the case of the Airblue crash, it is still not clear what caused the crash as the black box has been sent abroad for investigations.
And officials said that the report of the black box might take up to months. And if the passengers’ relatives accept a compensation amount from the airline in the meantime, they will not be able to claim more money under the second tier in case the black box reveals that the crash was the responsibility of the carrier.

International examples also show that the compensation amount is usually more than Rs1 million. Mr Khan cited the example of a recent air crash in

India. “In May this year an Air India jetliner crashed in Mangalore, India, and 158 passengers were killed. However, the lowest amount that the relatives claimed under the Montreal Convention was Indian Rs75 lakh per passenger from the airline.”

It is for these reasons that Mr Rehman, whose brother-in-law died in the air crash is planning to take the airline to court.
He is also questioning the decision of the authorities to hand over the death certificates to the airline for distribution to the relatives. According to Dr Jahanzeb Aurakzai, Joint Executive Director of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences, the hospital has handed over 152 death certificates to Airblue.

“I don't know according to what law they (Pims officials) have handed over the death certificates to the airline,” said Mr Rehman. “We have already approached a lawyer.”

Mr Rehman is not the only one who is in a litigious mood. On Sunday, an English language newspaper carried an ad from a Karachi-based advocate, Nisar A. Mujhaid. The ad asked the relatives of the crash victims to contact his legal firm for claiming compensation from the Airblue. Mr Mujahid now claims that “Twenty-five relatives of the crash victims have approached my legal firm.”

When asked what he planned to sue the company for, he said the heirs had the right to claim the compensation “according to international aviation standards”.