THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden and Ukraine launched a case towards Iran on the United Nations’ highest court docket Wednesday over the downing in 2020 of a Ukrainian passenger jet and the deaths of all 176 passengers and crew.
The 4 nations need the International Court of Justice to rule that Iran illegally shot down the Ukraine International Airlines aircraft and to order Tehran to apologize and pay compensation to the households of the victims.
Flight PS752 was touring from Tehran to Kyiv on Jan. 8, 2020 when it was shot down quickly after takeoff. The individuals killed included nationals and residents of Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, in addition to Afghanistan and Iran. Their ages ranged from 1 12 months to 74 years outdated.
“Today’s legal action reflects our unwavering commitment to achieving transparency, justice and accountability for the families of the victims,” the nations stated in a joint assertion Wednesday. They stated they filed the case after Iran failed to reply to a December request for arbitration.
Following three days of denials in In January 2020, Iran stated its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard mistakenly downed the Ukrainian aircraft with two surface-to-air missiles. Iranian authorities blamed an air protection operator who they stated mistook the Boeing 737-800 for an American cruise missile.
An Iranian court docket this 12 months sentenced an air protection commander allegedly chargeable for the downing to 13 years imprisonment, in line with the nation’s official judiciary information outlet.
But the nations that filed the case with the world court docket in The Hague known as the prosecution “a sham and opaque trial.”
According to the court docket submitting printed Wednesday, the U.Okay., Canada, Sweden and Ukraine 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 submitting alleges that Iran withheld or destroyed proof, blamed different nations and low stage Revolutionary Guard personnel, “threatened and harassed the families of the victims seeking justice” and did not report particulars of the incident to the International Civil Aviation Organization.
The downing occurred on the identical day Iran launched a ballistic missile assault on U.S. troops in Iraq in retaliation for an American drone strike that killed a high Iranian common.
Last week, Iran filed a case towards Canada linked to the downing, accusing the North American nation of flouting state immunity in permitting family of terrorism victims to hunt reparations from the Islamic Republic.
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