Annex14, sir
Annex14, thank you for your posted comments, and effectively impelling me to revise and extend my remarks. Let me please start with a brief note of background and/or explanation: in serving as an adjunct professor in one of my university's doctorate programs, I have been acculturated to the use of message board such as this as a means to provoke discussion from which participants may gain a better or deeper understanding of the subject at hand. In this effort I may overlook subtleties of word-choice. To wit, I meant no offense to the men and women who serve ICAO, nor to the fine and important work the organisation has done and continues to do.
Rather, the point embedded in the phrase 'concocted jurisdictional scope' is, in fact, nicely illustrated by your observation as to the relative lack of effectiveness of the FAA (with respect to requiring adherence to R/T standards). FAA, recall, has the full authority of the United States Government behind it. It has all the law enforcement staff and means and so on. Yet it is inadequate to some of its primary accountabilities: how many years has its next generation data processing system been in the pipeline?
What means does ICAO have at its disposal to enforce or require compliance with its standards?
Moreover, ICAO covers the world (I was tipped off by the word International, I guess). There are signatory states, are there not, where the concept of adherence to the R/T standards is far from anyone's idea of important? (Or maybe there are not any such states, but by intuitive reasoning, if a major customer of Airbus and Boeing flies a perfectly good aircraft into a hull loss in perfectly good weather, how well does that customer's nation-state do with ICAO standards compliance?). And are there not nations in which operators of big iron in civil transport exist, but are not signatories? Maybe ICAO is universal. I just have a hard time thinking that the approach metering from whatever they use as a TRACON for Damascus Int'l (as a random example) is as good as my friendly neighborhood ORD Terminal Control Area (that's what TCA stands for, right?). And so the whole world-wide system is so massive with so many moving parts (literally and figuratively!!) that -WITHOUT denigrating ICAO such as it is - the means and methods of that fine organisation still seem insufficient to tackle and ground this problem as a whole.
I plead guilty to seeing things through the prism of American law. But I try to be open-minded and thus, again, thank you, and good day.