Ontario court upholds unlimited compensation from UIA to families of Iran-downed plane victims

The Court of Appeal of the Canadian province of Ontario has dismissed the appeal of Ukraine International Airlines (UIA), which denied its negligence in the situation of the downing of the company's flight PS752 by Iran on January 8, 2020, and confirmed the unlimited liability of the company to compensate the families of those killed in the plane crash.

"The trial judge found in paragraph 5 that "UIA" did not prove, on the balance of probabilities, that it was not negligent in allowing flight PS752 to depart from Tehran on January 8, 2020, therefore its liability under the Montreal Convention is unlimited. UIA files an appeal," the judge recalled the circumstances of the case in the appeal decision, which was published on Wednesday.

He explained that otherwise the liability would have been limited to CAD 235,000 per passenger (about $170,000 at the current exchange rate).

According to the published court decision, the company was negligent in failing to assess the risks of flying from Iran during military tension, and the departure of six other flights by Austrian Airlines, Aeroflot, Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines and Atlas Global before the crash and after the NOTAM warnings were issued is not an excuse.

The final report on the investigation into flight PS752 also noted four other cases of commercial airliners being shot down while flying near areas where there was a war zone or military conflict: Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983, Islamic Republic of Iran Airlines Flight 655 in 1988, Sibir Airlines Flight 1812 in 2001, which crashed during Ukrainian air defense exercises in Crimea, and African Express Airway Flight 5Y-AXO in 2020.

As previously reported, the UIA Boeing 737-800 was shot down near Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran shortly after takeoff. There were 167 passengers and nine crew members on board. All of them died. Among the dead were 11 Ukrainian citizens (including nine crew members), 82 Iranian citizens, 63 Canadians, 10 Swedish, four Afghans, three each from Germany and the UK.

On January 11, Iranian authorities admitted that the Boeing was shot down by mistake by the Iranian military. Later, the Commander of the Aerospace Forces of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Amir Ali Hajizadeh, stated that he takes full responsibility for the crash of the Ukrainian plane.

In 2023, an Iranian court sentenced ten Iranian military personnel for the shooting down of Ukrainian passenger plane PS752 of International Airlines over Tehran in 2020, Alarabia News reported, citing the judicial system website Mizan Online.

Subsequently, in January 2024, the International Group initiated proceedings within the ICAO Council against Iran for its violation of the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation. The ICAO Council ruled in favor of Ukraine, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom and referred the case to the merits, despite Iran’s attempt to challenge the jurisdiction of the ICAO Council over the complaint about the downing of a civilian airliner.

Already in October 2024, the Coordination Group presented a Memorandum within the framework of the consideration of the case on the downing of PS752 at the International Court of Justice of the United Nations. Ukraine, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom supported this key document in the case with irrefutable evidence of Iran’s violation of the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation, adopted in 1971.

Iran, in turn, filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice in April 2025, demanding the annulment of the decision of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) council regarding the 2020 plane crash.