Ukraine: We will sue Iran at the International Court of Justice
Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister said his country will take the passenger plane crash case to the International Court of Justice sooner or later. He said Ukraine has offered Iran negotiations four times but has received no response.
Ukraine's Deputy Foreign Minister has announced that the country may sooner or later file a complaint against Iran with the International Court of Justice regarding the passenger plane crash case.
“We definitely need a serious legal team because this could be a very serious confrontation,” Yvonne Ennin told reporters on Monday, July 6. “We are prepared to go to the International Court of Justice sooner or later and force the Iranian authorities to agree to a pre-trial settlement, and that will not be possible without proper evidence and documentation. The stronger the evidence, the greater and faster the chance of reaching an agreement.”
According to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine, the country has submitted notes to Iran at least four times with a specific proposal to start negotiations as soon as possible. However, he said, he has not received any specific official response from Iran.
"We understood their [Iran's] willingness to talk from some of their interviews," Enin said.
According to the Deputy Foreign Minister of Ukraine, the negotiation mechanism is based on information obtained from technical and criminal investigations, and the goal of the negotiations is to force Iran, based on its international responsibility, not only to apologize but also to provide guarantees that this incident will not be repeated in the future, as well as to pay compensation.
Iran's reaction
The Deputy Minister of Legal Affairs and International Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in an interview with the Mizan website about the Ukrainian passenger plane crash case, said: "Any country that acts mischievously in the case of the Ukrainian plane crash will end up at its own loss; the reason is that the path of this issue has been determined by international law. The issue is a specific issue and whoever wants to go outside the framework will lose himself."
Mohsen Baharvand said that Iran agreed in "good faith" to transfer the plane's black box to Ukraine, but Ukraine said it was not capable of reading the box and that the box should be transferred to a third country.
This is despite the fact that seven months have passed since the incident, Iran has not yet sent the black boxes to any country, and in its latest statement, it was announced that the boxes will be sent to France on July 20th.
The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister claimed that it was the Ukrainian side that “wasted time,” saying, “Anyway, sometimes too much goodwill leads to misunderstanding on the other side.”
The six countries whose nationals were on the Ukrainian plane have repeatedly asked Iran to either enter into negotiations or hand over the black boxes, and none of these requests have been fulfilled by Iran so far.
While the Ukrainian Foreign Minister said that he had sent a specific proposal to Iran four times and that Iran had not responded, the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic said in a statement: "The Ukrainian side wasted a lot of our time and did not enter into negotiations with us regarding the draft in question; therefore, we decided to make the necessary arrangements with the French Air Accidents Investigation Bureau to transfer the black box, given Ukraine's procrastination and the unwillingness of the countries involved to hold a meeting to determine the fate of the incident due to the coronavirus outbreak."
Baharvand said about the audio file of an Iranian official's conversation with one of the survivors of the plane crash: "First of all, we did not hear this voice and we do not know where it came from; secondly, someone may have spoken to one of the survivors of this disaster and tried to console him; mentioning this as a fact has neither credibility nor legal validity; what is certain, and our now completed report shows, is that human error was the cause of this incident; if we were deliberately doing what some media circles claim, we should not have arrested six people and prepared them for trial."
Canada's CBC News reported that it had obtained a 91-minute audio recording recorded on March 7 of this year, which contains a conversation between a family member of one of the victims of the Ukrainian plane crash and Hassan Rezaeifar, head of the Iranian Investigative Committee, about the incident.
Based on the statements contained in this "audio file," senior Iranian officials did not declare a no-fly zone over the country on January 8 of last year in order to prevent the IRGC's missile attack on US bases in Iraq from being revealed.
On January 8, 2019, Ukrainian International Airlines (UIA) Flight PS752, a Boeing-737, was shot down by two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps air defense missiles six minutes after takeoff from Imam Khomeini Airport near Tehran. All 176 people on board were killed.
Iran admitted three days after the incident that it had “accidentally shot down a passenger plane.” Iranian officials had previously stated in contradictory statements that the cause of the plane crash was a technical malfunction. But eventually, under international pressure, they confirmed that the plane had been shot down and attributed the cause to “human error.”
Source: DW
