Sunday 24 August 2014

Here Is A Question to Mull Over,

after Sunday lunch, 

Sky Babies, here is the question, imagine, if a pregnant American woman boards a German flight to the Maldives and gives birth while flying over Pakistan, does the baby get Pakistani citizenship? there is an ancient doctrine, enshrined in English common law, that says Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos, which means, "Whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way up to heaven and down to hell."

that was the old rule, before the advent of air balloons, then aeroplanes, it's been seriously amended (at least in Britain) to a much more modest: You own the airspace necessary for "the use and enjoyment" of your plot of land, so how high up is that?

apparently, not that high, clouds, for example, don't belong to you, Nations have made bolder claims to owning the sky, some countries say their territory extends 43 miles up, some say 99, everyone agrees there's an upper limit, but legal theories differ, one notion says when there's no longer enough air in the atmosphere to lift a plane, that's where outer (and shared) space begins, others say the private zone must include the path of an orbiting satellite, eight equatorial nations, in the Bogota Declaration of 1976, bumped their claims to 22,300 miles above earth — where geostationary spy satellites can park and look down,


We can assume that American parents would not allow any legal move to take away their child’s American citizenship, and does the old rules of ships’ registries apply to aeroplanes? it appears that no one knows the definitive answer about “sky babies,” and it largely depends on the citizenship laws of individual nations, some allow for dual or triple citizenship, others don’t, for an answer or not, (it appears that there is no definitive ruling regarding sky babies) have a look here.


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