Cite as: 516 U. S. 217 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
the right to bring suit and what are their respective rights." 49 Stat. 3020 (emphasis added).3
The most natural reading of this Article is that, in an action brought under Article 17, the law of the Convention does not affect the substantive questions of who may bring suit and what they may be compensated for. Those questions are to be answered by the domestic law selected by the courts of the contracting states. Petitioners contend that, because Article 24 refers to the parties' "respective rights," this provision defers to domestic law only on the "procedural" issues of who has standing to sue and how the proceeds of a damages award under Article 17 should be divided among eligible claimants. It does not seem to us that the question of who is entitled to a damages award is procedural; and in any event limiting Article 24 to procedural issues would render it superfluous, since Article 28(2) provides that "[q]uestions of procedure shall be governed by the law of the court to which the case is submitted." 49 Stat. 3021. More importantly, petitioners' reading of Article 24(2) would produce a strange regime in which 1929 French law (embodied in the Convention) determines what harms arising out of international air accidents must be indemnified, while current domestic law determines who is entitled to the indemnity and how it is to be divided among claimants. When presented with an equally plausible reading of Article 24 that leads to a more comprehensible result—that the Convention left to domestic law the questions of who may recover and what compensatory damages are available to them—we decline to
3 The governing French text of Article 24 provides: "(1) Dans les cas prévus aux articles 18 et 19 toute action en responsabilité, à quelque titre que ce soit, ne peut être exercée que dans les conditions et limites prévues par la présente Convention. "(2) Dans les cas prévus à l'article 17, s'appliquent également les dispositions de l'alinéa précédent, sans préjudice de la détermination des person-nes qui ont le droit d'agir et de leurs droits respectifs." 49 Stat. 3006.
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