Convention on International Civil Aviation is recorded in this encyclopedia from the source named below.
Overview
The Convention on International Civil Aviation, also known as the Chicago Convention, established the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) charged with coordinating international air travel. The convention establishes rules of airspace, aircraft registration, and safety, security, and sustainability, and details the rights of the signatories in relation to air travel. The convention also contains provisions pertaining to taxation. The document was signed on December 7, 1944, in Chicago by 52 signatory states. It received the requisite 26th ratification on March 5, 1947, and went into effect on April 4, 1947, the same date that ICAO came into being. In October of the same year, ICAO became a specialized agency of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The convention has since been revised eight times (in 1959, 1963, 1969, 1975, 1980, 1997, 2000, and 2006). As of March 2019, the Chicago Convention had 193 state parties, which includes all member states of the UN except Liechtenstein. The Cook Islands is a party to the Convention although it is not a member of the UN. The convention has been extended to cover Liechtenstein by the ratification of Switzerland.
Source and reuse
The descriptive text above is drawn from the English-language encyclopedia article Convention on International Civil Aviation, reused under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence and attributed in the sources block on this page. Figures in the infobox come from Wikidata and carry that project's own provenance; they should be checked against the cited source before being relied on.
Editorial note
This record is a sourced summary, not original research. Where the underlying material is silent on a point, this article is silent too. Last reviewed 2026-09-23.