Oksana Bidnenko is a staff correspondent for JURIST. She is a Ukrainian law student at the Riga Graduate School of Law in Riga, Latvia, and is currently an exchange student at the University of Oslo, Norway. 

It was announced last week that Ukraine and other members of the International Coordination and Response Group for the victims of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 are filing a lawsuit against Iran at the UN-associated International Court of Justice for the downing of the UIA plane in 2020 which claimed the lives of all 176 people on board.

The International Coordination Group, comprising representatives from Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, and Great Britain, highlighted the absence of an agreement with Iran for organizing arbitration under Article 14 of the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation. Article 14 permits arbitration if negotiations fail to reach an agreement, and if within six months the parties are unable to agree on the organization of the arbitration, one of the parties may refer the dispute to the International Court of Justice

The joint statement by the International Coordination and Response Group for the Victims of Flight PS752, posted on the website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states:

“We, the members of the International Coordination and Response Group for the victims of Flight PS752, express our concern over the failure to reach an agreement on the organization of arbitration between Iran and the Coordination Group, as stipulated by Article 14 of the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation.”

The  UIA Boeing-737 crashed on January 8, 2020, shortly after departing from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. The tragedy claimed the lives of 167 passengers and 9 crew members, including nationals from various countries. Initially, Iranian authorities denied responsibility for three days but later acknowledged that the plane was mistakenly shot down by its anti-aircraft forces.

The decryption of the “black boxes” of the downed plane by France in July 2020 confirmed that the aircraft was hit by a missile and was in good condition at the time of the incident, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The investigation into the tragedy by the Iranian side has faced repeated criticism from Ukraine and other countries involved. UN special rapporteurs raised concerns about Iran’s violations of international law, inaccuracies in the investigation report, and lack of transparency. For example, Iran alleges that an error in the alignment of the mobile missile unit contributed to the mistaken targeting, but it has not provided any explanation as to why this radar miscalibration occurred, why it had not been detected, and how it led to the targeting. Moreover, Iran did not provide any information on why other flights that took off that night, before PS752, were not targeted..

Meanwhile Iran had complained about Canada to the top court of the UN, claiming that Canada had broken international law by permitting people to sue Tehran for damages. Iran’s case was being examined, according to Ottawa, which stated it “will take the appropriate next steps in accordance with the International Court of Justice’s procedures.”

In April of this year, the first defendant in the PS752 case was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The indictment revealed that the commander of the Tor M-1 air defense complex had fired two missiles at the Ukrainian aircraft without proper authorization, contrary to the order of the command post and relevant instructions.

Iran’s suspicious behavior and rejection of Ukrainian participation in the investigation of the tragedy has significantly worsened the relations between Ukraine and Iran in 2020. For Ukraine, the downing of its civilian plane still remains a tragic memory. Unfortunately, bilateral relations went to a critical level due to Iran’s military assistance to Russia during the full-scale war in Ukraine. Since 2022 Iran has been supplying Shahed drones that are used by Russia to target civilian objects in Ukraine. Additionally, the occupying forces of Russia use Iranian 122-mm artillery ammunition in the war against Ukraine. It is likely that Russia has bought at least 40,000 122-mm artillery shells from Iran.