Four countries take Iran to court over 2020 downing of Ukrainian passenger jet
THE HAGUE — Britain, Canada, Sweden and Ukraine launched a case against Iran at the United Nations’ highest court Wednesday over the downing in 2020 of a Ukrainian passenger jet and the deaths of all 176 passengers and crew.
The four countries want the International Court of Justice to rule 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 Jan. 8, 2020, when it was shot down soon after takeoff. The people killed included nationals and residents of the four countries taking legal action against Iran, as well as Afghanistan and Iran. Their ages ranged from 1 to 74 years old.
“Today’s legal action reflects our unwavering commitment to achieving transparency, justice and accountability for the families of the victims,” the countries said in a joint statement Wednesday. They said they filed the case after Iran failed to respond to a December request for arbitration.
Following three days of denials in January 2020, Iran acknowledged that its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard mistakenly downed the Ukrainian plane with two surface-to-air missiles. Iranian authorities blamed an air-defense operator who they said mistook the Boeing 737-800 for an American cruise missile.
An Iranian court this year sentenced the air-defense commander to 13 years in prison, according to the country’s official judiciary news outlet.
Iranian media say 10 officials have been indicted over the shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane last year, which killed 176 people.
But the countries that filed the case with the world court in The Hague called the prosecution “a sham and opaque trial.”
According to the court filing published Wednesday, the four countries argue that Iran “failed to take all practicable measures to prevent the unlawful and intentional commission of an offense” and “failed to conduct an impartial, transparent, and fair criminal investigation and prosecution consistent with international law.”
The filing alleges that Iran withheld or destroyed evidence, blamed other countries and low-level Revolutionary Guard personnel, “threatened and harassed the families of the victims seeking justice” and failed to report details of the incident to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
The downing happened on the same day that Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Iraq in retaliation for an American drone strike that killed a top Iranian general.
Last week, Iran filed a case against Canada linked to the downing, accusing Ottawa of ignoring state immunity in allowing relatives of terrorism victims to seek reparations from the Islamic Republic.
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