A Study on Compensation for Pure Mental Injury Caused by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in International Carriage by air : Focusing on the CJEU Decision in Case C-111/21
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Article 17 of the Montreal Convention limits carrier liability to cases of “death or bodily injury,” which has traditionally excluded pure psychological harm such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from compensation. This resulted from the bodily-injury-centered structure inherited from the Warsaw Convention, designed to protect the aviation industry and restrict liability. Consequently, psychological injury was recognized only when connected to bodily injury. Yet, the medical recognition of psychiatric disorders, strengthened passenger-rights standards, and the rise of atypical aviation incidents—including infectious-disease exposure, terrorism-related trauma, and forcible deplaning—have amplified calls for the autonomous legal protection of psychological injury. The Court of Justice of the European Union's BT v. Laudamotion (2022) judgment marks a turning point by expressly acknowledging the compensability of psychological injury independent of bodily injury. Relying on the Vienna Convention's treaty-interpretation rules, the Convention's travaux préparatoires, and its teleological goals of fair compensation and balanced interests, the Court reframed the interpretive question as whether clinically significant psychological harm caused by an aircraft accident must be compensable. It held that psychological injury not linked to bodily injury may fall within Article 17 when its severity equals that of bodily injury resulting from the same accident. To prevent unlimited liability, the CJEU imposed strict conditions, requiring objective medical evidence of psychological impairment, serious deterioration of health, and the necessity of medical treatment. This shifts the evidentiary structure from proving a causal link between psychological and bodily injury to a model of conditional—but independent—recognition. This study situates the Laudamotion judgment within ongoing debates on expanding protection for psychological injury and potential textual reforms of the Montreal Convention. It aims to evaluate the judgment's contribution to opening compensation for PTSD without altering the structural core of Article 17 and to explore future directions for reconstructing the legal framework of psychological-injury protection in international air carriage.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".