ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of international civil aviation, States always had to take the initiative in regulating the commercial aspects of international air transport. Indeed, as the Chicago Convention was mute with respect to the exchange of market access/traffic rights between commercial air carriers, in 1946, States started to negotiate bilaterally.! More recently, the two ICAO Conferences in 1992 and 1994 have shown how difficult it is to reach an agreement on the replacement of the bilateral system by a global liberal multilateral system. Conscious of the need to start the liberalization process, some States therefore concluded regional agreements. Today, it is time to go beyond the regional stage and progressively turn the regional agreements into plurilateral conventions and, later, into a multilateral treaty.
