At ICAO we serve as the global forum for States for international civil aviation. We develop policies and Standards, undertake compliance audits, perform studies and analyses, provide assistance and build aviation capacities through many activities and the cooperation of its Member States and stakeholders.
As new priorities are identified by these stakeholders, the ICAO secretariat convenes panels, task forces, conferences and seminars to explore their technical, political, socio-economic and other aspects. We then provide governments with the best advice as they collectively and diplomatically establish new international standards and recommended practices for civil aviation internationally.
Once governments achieve diplomatic consensus around a new standard’s scope and details, it is then adopted by 193 countries in order to bring worldwide alignment to their national regulations. This helps to realize safe, secure, and sustainable air operations on a truly global basis.
These new standards and regulations are published in Standards and Recommended Practices (SARP) documents (that include the Convention, its Annexes, and Legal Documents). During ICAO’s 39th General Assembly there was a proposal to provide free public access to these publications to support the No Country Left Behind initiative and to assist States in implementing SARPs. Finding the best approach to implement this took a significant amount of analysis and effort.
Our eLibrary platform provides users with free access to read-only versions of publications that include tools for citation, sharing, bookmarks, highlighting text, and comments. All of these benefits improve reading experiences and the ability to reference important information; users can return to their bookmarked documents and color code their comments to be able to easily find the content they require across several publications. To benefit from these features users only have to set up an account here, and all of the personalizations and reading features will become available. Every year additional publications are added to the eLibrary platform. We notify subscribers when updates to the publications become available, additional premium services (such as downloading and printing) are available for those who have subscribed.