By Jack Branswell / The Canadian Press

Montreal - The families of airline passengers who die in crashes should be better compensated under a new international agreement signed Friday.

The International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets safety standards for air travel, has developed a new pact it hopes will modernize and streamline the claims process for families of victims.

The deal creates a two-tiered system in which families are entitled to advance payments of up to $140,000 US after a carrier's accident, regardless of whether the airline was at fault.

The second stage contains no financial limit on liability and the carrier must prove it isn't at fault.

ICAO said the deal will help unify a very fragmented international process of claims based on a 70-year-old system.

But more than one-third of 121 ICAO-member nations that attended a three-week conference here did not sign the deal Friday.

Another 64 states, who are ICAO members, did not attend the conference and are not expected to sign the agreement for now.

Conference president Kenneth Rattray acknowledged that means there is still a checkerboard system across the world.

"Until all 185 (ICAO-member) states become party there will be no uniform system," he said.

"Obviously we hope that all states will become parties. But until that takes place there will still be liability regimes under the old system."

Under that system, compensation for the death or injury of a passenger peaked at $8,300 US.

But Ludwig Weber, director of ICAO's legal bureau, said the new deal removes the legal barrier of limits on litigation.

"That is an important innovation," he said.

Litigation over the Korean Airlines Flight 007 shot down over Russia in 1983 and lawsuits over the decade-old Air India explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, have been tied up over the question of compensation limits.

"That litigation has almost always been over the limitation of liability or whether the so-called wilful misconduct laws could be invoked which allows a passenger to break that limit," Weber said.

But none of these new provisions is retroactive.

The deal also calls for advance payments to families to be paid quickly but that clause is subject to the national law of the carrier.

Rattray said nations are being encouraged to pass legislation requiring early compensation to cover immediate costs after a crash.

"I think the airline industry as a whole is coming around to accepting it," he said. "It is also very good public relations.

"Swissair made advance payments because they recognized the humanitarian issues and to a large extent I think that example has inspired us to make provisions in that regard."

Swissair 111 crashed last September near Peggy's Cove, N.S., killing all 229 people aboard the flight. No definite cause has been determined yet.

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