July 5 () –
The governments of Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom have already formalized their complaint against Iran before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the shooting down of a Ukraine International Airlines passenger plane that was attacked on January 8, 2020, shortly after taking off from Tehran, as reported by the court on Wednesday.
The claimant countries had already advanced the initiative last week and finally formalized the procedures on Tuesday, according to a statement from the ICJ. They allege that Iran violated the Montreal Convention, designed to guarantee the safety of civil aviation, for a shoot-down that claimed the lives of the 176 people on board, mostly nationals of the four countries that have filed the complaint.
They consider that the Iranian authorities did not adopt “all the practical measures” that could be expected to prevent an incident of this type, just as they miss an “impartial, transparent and fair” investigation that would open the door to a judicial process with the guarantees required by International Law, the court states in its note.
The commander of the Tor M-1 anti-aircraft defense system, sentenced to thirteen years in prison, thought that flight PS752 was a cruise missile, for which reason he ordered it to be fired despite not having authorization and despite the fact that it was going against the established protocols. Two surface-to-air missiles were launched, bringing down the aircraft.
Three days after the tragedy, the Government of Iran acknowledged that it shot down the plane “by mistake” amid tension over the death in a US attack on Iraqi soil of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, architect of the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy .
