KLM Royal Dutch Airlines v Morris - Court of Appeal (Lord Phillips MR, Peter Gibson and Latham LJJ) - 17 May 2001

Carriage by air - Warsaw Convention - Female passenger suffering mental injury after being indecently assaulted in aeroplane - Whether incident was an "accident" and whether passenger suffered "bodily injury" within meaning of Article 17 of Convention

On 6 September 1998 the respondent, who was then aged almost 16 years, boarded the appellant’s aeroplane at Kuala Lumpur on a flight to Amsterdam. She had visited her uncle in Kuala Lumpur and was travelling as an unaccompanied minor. She was seated next to two men who were speaking French to each other. After a meal, she fell asleep and woke to discover the hand of the man next to her touching her left thigh from the hip to the knee. He was caressing her between her hip and knee and his fingers dug into her thigh. She got up, walked away, and told an air hostess what had occurred. She became very distressed and on her return to her home in England she went to see a doctor. He found that she was suffering from a clinical depression amounting to a single episode of a major depressive illness. She made a full recovery.