Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and Great Britain asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to prosecute Iran for shooting down a Boeing 737-800 ofUkraine International Airlines in 2020, claiming the lives of all 176 people on board.
Most of the crash victims were nationals of these four countries, which created a coordination group aimed at holding Iran to account. In their petition to the ICJ, the four countries claim that the Islamic Republic of Iran has failed “a number of obligations” under the Montreal Convention, which aims to guarantee the safety of civil air transport. According to them, Iran failed to take all possible measures to prevent the crash of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, and failed to conduct an impartial, transparent and fair criminal investigation and prosecution.
As a reminder, the Iranian armed forces shot down the Ukraine International Airlines aircraft on January 8, 2020, shortly after taking off from Tehran airport, in what the Iranian authorities described at the time as “disastrous mistake“. In a report released in March 2021, Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization blamed the crash on misaligned radar and air defense operator error.
