(The Hague) Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ukraine on Wednesday initiated proceedings against Iran in the United Nations’ highest court following the 2020 downing of a Ukrainian airliner and the death of 176 passengers and crew.
The four countries want the International Court of Justice to declare that Iran illegally shot down the Ukraine International Airlines plane and to order Tehran to apologize and pay compensation to the families of the victims.
Flight PS752 was traveling from Tehran to Kyiv on January 8, 2020 when it was shot down shortly after takeoff. Among those killed were nationals and residents of Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, as well as Afghanistan and Iran. Their ages ranged from 1 year to 74 years.
“The legal step completed today reflects our unwavering commitment to ensuring transparency, justice and accountability for victims and their families,” the countries said in a joint statement on Wednesday. They said they filed the suit after Iran failed to respond to a request for arbitration made in December.
After three days of denials in January 2020, Iran admitted that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guards had mistakenly shot down the Ukrainian plane using two surface-to-air missiles. Iranian authorities have blamed an air defense operator who they say mistook the Boeing 737-800 for a US cruise missile.
This year, an Iranian court sentenced an air defense commander allegedly responsible for the incident to 13 years in prison, according to the country’s official judicial news outlet.
But the countries that took the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague called the lawsuits “a show trial and an opaque trial”.
According to the document released on Wednesday, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Ukraine maintain that Iran “failed to take all possible measures to prevent the unlawful and intentional commission of an offense” and “n failed to carry out an impartial, transparent and fair criminal investigation and prosecution in accordance with international law”.
Iran allegedly concealed or destroyed evidence, blamed other countries and low-level Revolutionary Guards, “threatened and harassed the families of victims seeking justice” and failed to release details of the incident to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
The incident took place the same day Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on US troops in Iraq, in retaliation for a US drone strike that killed a senior Iranian general.
Last week, Iran filed a lawsuit against Canada over the incident, accusing the country of flouting state immunity by allowing relatives of terror victims to seek compensation from the Islamic Republic.