Justice for Victims of the MH17 and their Loved Ones

That the Parliament marks with sadness the seventh anniversary of the unprovoked shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 by what it believes was a Russian army-owned Buk surface-to-air missile from a farm near Pervomaisk, an area that was under control of pro-Russian forces, as it was travelling above Kursk from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July 2014, resulting in 298 deaths, including 15 crew members and 80 children; applauds the efforts of the Joint Investigation Team, comprising of officials from the Dutch Public Prosecution Service and the Dutch police, along with police and criminal justice authorities from Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine to establish the facts of the case, determine the truth of what happened, identify those responsible for downing flight MH17, and gather criminal evidence for prosecution; acknowledges that the District Court of The Hague has now concluded its first block of hearings on the merits in the MH17 criminal trial brought by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service against the four suspects, four Russian and one Ukrainian, which commenced on 7 June 2021, with proceedings scheduled to continue in the autumn; notes that the first hearing by the European Court of Human Rights of the inter-state application that the Netherlands submitted against the Russian Federation on 10 July 2020 for its role in the downing of Flight MH17, now joined with a Ukrainian application, will take place on 24 November 2021; continues to support not only the Dutch victims and families but all 298 MH17 victims, of 17 different nationalities, and their loved ones; backs the Netherlands, the Joint Investigation Team and the Dutch Public Prosecution Service in its continued pursuit of truth, justice and accountability; urges the Russian Federation once again to accept responsibility for what it considers a heinous act of terrorism and to help secure justice for the victims and their families, and expresses Scotland’s continuing sympathy to everyone whose lives have been impacted by what it considers this senseless act of mass murder.