The Liabilities of Airlines in Case of Passengers Have Been Infected by COVID-19 on Board
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Abstract
This academic article aims to analyze airline liability. If a passenger contracts COVID-19 on an airplane, is it an “accident”? for which the airline will be responsible. In this study, the principles on liability under the Warsaw Convention, Montreal Convention and International Air Carriage Act B.E. 2558, Strict liability, United States judicial liability principle, liability Principle according to the laws of the Republic of the Philippines and the European Union are applied as an analysis framework.
The results of the analysis revealed that the International Air Carriage Act B.E. 2558 does not have a clear definition of the word “accident”, but the principle of determining whether it is an accident or not will be determined by the actions or omissions of the airline that cause damage to the life or body of the passenger if the incident is caused by the condition of the passenger’s own body, such as having a congenital disease but in the case of COVID-19 infection, it is related to the actions or omissions of the airlines. If the airline does not take the highest level of caution in screening passengers at risk, it will not expose other passengers to COVID-19. As such, it is an accident for which the airline will be liable. Therefore, in order to protect passengers, the law has to define the definition of “accident” to mean action or omission. Whether due to will or negligence of the air carrier which the air carrier has a duty to act in order to prevent possible harm to passengers, including the actions of other people that cause damage to passengers by which the air carrier is at fault.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Academic articles, research articles, and book reviews in the Ph.D. in Social Sciences Journal are author’s opinions, and not the publisher’s, and is not the responsibility of the Ph.D. in Social Sciences Journal Philosophy Association, Ramkhamhaeng University. (In the case that research is done on human, the researcher has to be trained in Ethics for Doing Research on Human Training and has to produce the evidence of the training).
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