Professor Sir Roy Goode played a key role in the preparation and adoption of the Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment and its associated Aircraft Protocol, as Chairman of the UNIDROIT Study Group that initiated the Cape Town project, Rapporteur to the three Joint Sessions of the UNIDROIT Committee of Governmental Experts and the ICAO Legal Sub-Committee, and a UK delegate and Chairman of the Drafting Committee and the Diplomatic Conference at Cape Town in 2001 that adopted these two instruments.
Mandated by the Diplomatic Conference to prepare an Official Commentary, he wrote what was to become the definitive guide to these two most influential and complex commercial law instruments. First published in 2002 at a time when the Convention and Protocol were not yet in force and the International Registry for the registration of international interests had yet to be established, the Official Commentary steadily expanded through successive editions as the two instruments entered into force, the International Registry become operative and the aviation industry, led by its Aviation Working Group, contributed its practical experience and the benefit of its own analyses. The Official Commentary also includes a detailed analysis of the Registry regulations. The author also draws on his long experience of involvement in laws governing cross-border transactions to examine related conventions and model laws, as well as complex conflict of laws issues and even some questions of public international law. The fifth edition was published in 2022, but further important questions have continued to arise, leading to this revised fifth edition, which also incorporates various corrections to the text.
Professor Goode has also published Official Commentaries on the Convention and Luxembourg Protocol (second ed. 2014, third ed. pending), Space Protocol (2013) and Protocol on Mining, Agricultural and Construction Equipment (2021).
The Convention has now been ratified by 86 States and the Protocol by 83 States, together in each case with what is now the European Union. This revised fifth edition, which results from intensive re-examination of the texts in light of a range of issues arising since 2022, is an essential guide for everyone engaged in aviation finance or otherwise wrestling with the complex issues created by the Convention and Protocol, whether as practising lawyer, financier, scholar or otherwise.
