Sustainable Tourism Law

THE UNWTO DRAFT CONVENTION ON THE PROTECTION OF TOURISTS 217 In other words, as a consequence of the mentioned provision, interested Countries might adopt from time to time the three Annexes to the Draft International Convention– and thus, specifically: Annex I – Assistance in emergency situations , the Annex II – Package travel and Annex III – Accommodation – or just two of them, in four different combinations that might occur, or only one of the documents; therefore, there might actually be eight different situations. As a consequence, the different attitude of States at the time of approval, acceptance or accession of the International Convention might effectively determine a highly non-homogeneous application of the Draft International Convention leading to extremely negative outcomes for what concerns the achievement of harmonization of the international legal framework. In such a scenario, there is a real risk that the attempt of the Special United Nations Agency to improve transparency and to increase the legal certainty through the implementation of a Draft International Convention ends in disappointment; besides, the latter may also increase the trust of travellers and guarantee that traders are able to operate in a setting based on equal opportunities and effective competition. Likewise, the chance given to interested States to partially adopt the new uniform rules might severely jeopardize the attempt to reach an adequate level of tourist protection through harmonization at international level of the rules concerning the assistance in the case of an emergency situations, together with the discipline of relations between tourists and service providers deriving from contracts on travel packages or accommodation services. IV. THE POSITION OF THE EUROPEAN UNION AND OTHER PUBLIC ENTITIES AND PRIVATE PARTIES The Working Group set up by the UNWTO in order to define the objectives of the draft International Convention and identify the legal framework to be implemented, discussed and revised over a long period of time ranging from 2010 to date, creating as many as 11 versions of the draft document 49 . 49 As expressly reported by the General Secretary A/22/10(I)(c) “UNWTO Convention on the Protection of the Tourists and on the Rights and Obligations of Tourism Service Providers” of 20 July 2017 (prepared for the 22nd session of the General Assembly, held in Chengdu, China, from 11 to 16 September 2017), the Provisional 11th draft text of the Convention , which may further be subject to change as a result of its review by the Working Group on the protection of tourists/consumers and travel organizers , cannot be considered as a proposal or official UNWTO document.