Countries have worldwide jurisdiction over their aircraft. If they felt the situation was serious of course they could suspend you. Not without reasonable cause of course and subject to normal rules of law and due process. The country in which you committed the breach could also charge you with a criminal offence (assuming what you did amounted to such eg a breach of the rules of the air/SERA under s160(2) of the UK ANO) and presumably ban you from their airspace if they were so minded.
Jason,
It would also be unfair if foreign licence holders were dealt with more harshly (ie prosecution rather than suspension until retrained).
Analogous situations come up in courts, where a foreign lorry driver has been driving under the influence and might have been granted a suspended sentence with conditions were he UK based, but the conditions can’t be met and he can therefore go to immediate custody. It’s a thorny subject, because it can end up either way – he gets a more or less severe penalty than his UK colleagues, but can’t get the same.
Timothy wrote:
It would also be unfair if foreign licence holders were dealt with more harshly (ie prosecution rather than suspension until retrained).
Indeed.
You can speed in Northern Ireland and get no penalty points in the Republic. They’ve been talking about changing that (and announcing changes) for year, but the situation still stands.
Indeed the opposite is true (and causes some problems) where Northern Ireland drivers can drive in the Republic and are largely immune.
What Timothy mentioned earlier in this thread was the current UK situation where they plan to suspend people pending a full investigation. I can’t see any other CAA actioning that. I can’t see it standing up under Irish law, as (as JasonC says) it’s subject to normal rules of law and due process. A request from a foreign government agency to suspend my licence pending a foreign government agency investigation isn’t due process.
We can but hope that it won’t stand up in the UK as well. There are a huge number of (I assume unintended) consequences, and those will be put to the CAA clearly.
@dublinpilot,
In all Member States of the EU, EASA’s rules are Commission Regulations, directly applicable in all MS. So if one of those Regulations says that one MS shall suspend a licence at the request of another MS, that overrides any national or common law. I haven’t looked for such a provision, but if there’s none today there could be one tomorrow.
@Peter,
A recent FOI response showed that since April 2011, the UK CAA-IET has obtained convictions in respect of barely 20% of contested charges. That’s right – those who plead not guilty to a CAA charge have an 8 out of 10 chance of avoiding a criminal record. The remedy is straightforward: just bypass these irksome courts which are altogether too good at determining who is lying and which dare to pass judgement accordingly: 
Jacko wrote:
In all Member States of the EU, EASA’s rules are Commission Regulations, directly applicable in all MS. So if one of those Regulations says that one MS shall suspend a licence at the request of another MS, that overrides any national or common law. I haven’t looked for such a provision, but if there’s none today there could be one tomorrow.
I’m not aware of any such regulation either. I can imagine such a regulation would be very hard to agree. Can you really imagine the UK CAA agreeing to automatically suspend a UK pilots licence if they got a request to do so from the Hungarian CAA?
I can also see problems. Regulations don’t override all national laws. No law, EU or otherwise, overrides the Constitution of the Republic of Ireland. That’s why we need a referendum for each new EU treaty. (It took two goes to pass the Lisbon & Nice treaties).
Jacko wrote:
just bypass these irksome courts which are altogether too good at determining who is lying
That is a rather naive interpretation of what happens in courts. The tribunal has to be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, of guilt and it is an adage that it is better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent is convicted.
If a defendant is lying, and the bench are almost certain that he is lying, he is found not guilty. Because almost ain’t enough.
So I wouldn’t put too much store by the belief that only the innocent walk from court without a record. I would say that most people who are found not guilty are probably guilty.
Can you really imagine the UK CAA agreeing to automatically suspend a UK pilots licence if they got a request to do so from the Hungarian CAA?
ICAO makes a provision for that too. Each CS is obliged to “persecute” a citizen on behalf of another ICAO CS. I got a taste of that from the UK CAA, acting on behalf of the DGAC, back in 2003 (details posted here previously)
But there is a limit to what the originator can achieve. The alleged crime has to be a crime in the citizen’s country too. Often this is not the case, or there are important differences, or there are important differences in the evidence required (or how it was obtained/processed). In my case, the DGAC was behaving like a load of cowboys, while the CAA were not going to do anything because e.g. no notams had been published on the TRA and nothing was on the VFR charts for another year. In the UK such a thing would never be prosecuted, for really obvious reasons. The CAA disposed of it by writing me a stiff letter, CCd to the DGAC, and that is as far as it goes in such a case.
In an extreme case, a CAS bust in Peoples’ Republic of Upper Volta might attract a death penalty. They won’t be able to get you for that if you are in the UK. Obviously you would best to never go back to the PRUV again
I have first hand experience on how this works between France and Germany.
Quite early on in my flying, I was on a trip back from Paris (Meaux-Esbly) to Germany in bad weather, and as a result of spectactularly bad weather decision making I finally made one good decision and landed in a field instead of pressing on. The local Gendarmerie had a nice afternoon out as they took the entire station out to the aircraft, some french aviation investigators turned up and interviewed me and took copies of my WX briefing, charts etc., and later next day we took of again, landed at the nearest airfield and then went on our merry way.
Some time later the French CAA wrote to the German CAA describing the incident, pointing out I really shouldn’t have flown in this sort of weather, pointed to some French law I violated in the process of taking off when safe completion of the flight was unlikely, and asked the German CAA to “reprimand” me (don’t remember the exact wording, presumably they meant just that, or a fine). The German CAA then wrote to me about the French request, and asked for a statement, which I wrote in the appropriate ILAFFT tone. German CAA wrote back a long letter amounting to “thank you, looks like you learned your lesson, don’t do it again”, copied the French CAA, and that was the end of it.
I consulted a lawyer at the time, and he told me that the German CAA could take any appropriate action up to and including fines or licence suspension, but would apply German policy when making their decision.
