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From: wales@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.legal
Subject: Is air piracy ALWAYS inexcusably evil?
Message-ID: <4260@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 11-Mar-85 14:24:13 EST
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.4260
Posted: Mon Mar 11 14:24:13 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 15-Mar-85 05:30:03 EST
Reply-To: wales@ucla-cs.UUCP (Rich Wales)
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 61

About a week or so ago, there was a story on the news about a couple of
people from the Middle East (Syria, I believe) who:

    (1) requested asylum in West Germany;
    (2) were refused asylum and were put on a plane bound for Syria;
    (3) hijacked the plane and forced it to land in Austria;
    (4) were going to be charged in Austria with air piracy, and their
	plea for asylum would therefore probably not be seriously con-
	sidered by Austrian authorities.

Now, I have been sufficiently repelled by the actions of various and
sundry terrorists that I would normally say that airplane hijacking or
similar action is always 100% wrong.  And I don't know the details of
the specific story I touched on above; in particular, I don't know why
said Syrians asked for asylum or why the West Germans turned them down.

But this got me to thinking.  Suppose you had the following scenario:

    (1) John Doe flees from country X to country Y and asks for asylum.
	For whatever reason (political expediency, bumbling bureaucracy,
	or whatever), country Y decides to reject his plea and instead
	chooses to return him to country X.

    (2) Let us suppose that country X is an evil, repressive dictator-
	ship with a grudge of some sort against John Doe.  As soon as
	Mr. Doe is returned to country X's soil, the X government plans
	either to kill him on the spot (perhaps via a staged accident
	or "assassination" by a third party, perhaps not) or else to
	give him a five-minute "trial" and then get rid of him.  Hence,
	John Doe has no hope whatever of due process or opportunity to
	escape certain death if he is returned to country X.

    (3) At some point during the "death flight", John Doe manages to
	overpower his guards and succeeds in coercing the flight crew
	into taking him to country Z, where he feels he may have a
	chance to gain asylum.

The question is:  Has John Doe committed an "a priori" inexcusable act
by hijacking the plane?

And if you say "yes":  What should John Doe have done instead?  (The
answer "allow himself to be returned to country X" is, in my view, not
worthy of serious consideration.)

Various other illegal acts could undoubtedly be substituted for air
piracy in the above; I chose air piracy in my example because it seems
in normal circumstances to be one of the most universally condemned of
modern crimes.
-- 

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                                                             Rich Wales
                           University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
                                            Computer Science Department
                                                      3531 Boelter Hall
                                   Los Angeles, California 90024 // USA
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Phone:    (213) 825-5683 // +1 213 825 5683
ARPANET:  wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA
UUCP:     ...!{cepu,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!wales
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