Special forces of many countries divert or force aircraft to land in order to detain people of interest. Not only the Americans are known for this, but Israel, Turkey, Iran...
Summary
The incident with the plane should be considered from the point of view of the security and that was provided. Belarus is ready to receive experts and show all materials about the incident with the Ryanair flight. The actions of Minsk corresponded to the established international rules. A commission has been created in Belarus to investigate the situation with the Ryanair plane landing.
It should be noted that similar cases of aircraft landing occurred earlier. So, on the night of July 3, 2013, the plane of the President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, heading from Moscow, had to make an emergency landing in Austria after Spain, Italy, France and Portugal closed their airspace for the airliner.
Disproof
The Belarusian authorities violated several international agreements on air traffic security in the so-called Ryanair incident, to which the disinfo claim in question refers.
On Sunday, May 23, 2021, the Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania was forced to turn back before crossing the Lithuanian border and land in the Belarusian capital. The pretext for landing in Minsk was a false report about the bomb on board. At the moment when the plane changed course, it was closer to Vilnius airport than to Minsk. The plane was forced to land in the Belarusian capital by a Belarusian military aircraft.
Roman Protasevich was detained during a repeated security check of passengers. Belarusian authorities persecuting him due to activities in reporting on the 2020 presidential election on his NEXTA channel on Telegram used by the country's opposition. The Belarusian security service, KGB, has listed him as a terrorist (Read more about Pratasevich here). Together with Roman Pratasevich was detained his girlfriend, a citizen of the Russian Federation Sofia Sapega.
From a legal perspective, international civil aviation is governed by the network of treaties, most notably by the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation and the 1971 Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation, (both of which Belarus is a party to.)
In examining those treaties, one can immediately see the outline of a powerful case as to why Belarus’ actions violate international law. Article 1(1)(e) of the Montreal Convention creates an international crime where a person unlawfully and intentionally “communicates information which he knows to be false, thereby endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight.” Secondly, per Article 10 of the Montreal Convention, a state must “in accordance with international and national law, endeavour to take all practicable measures for the purpose of preventing the offenses mentioned in Article 1.”
Moreover, by breaching Article 10 of the Montreal Convention in persuading Flight FR4978 to land, Belarus has equally breached Article 3bis(b) of the Chicago Convention. That provision provides that in exercising its right to ground an aircraft in transit over its territory, a state can only do so by resorting to “appropriate means consistent with relevant rules of international law.”
As for the claim, that there were other cases, for example with the plane of Evo Morales, that case did not involve bomb scares or crackdowns on the political opposition. The two cases cannot be compared. The case with Ryanair FR4879 is unique, as the aircraft was intercepted by military fighter-jets, armed with air-to-air missiles. At no earlier occasion, legal authorities have mobilised the military to detain a wanted criminal.
Unlike the Belarusian plot, which involved fighter jets and bomb threats, the Bolivian flight was brought down by bureaucracy: European nations refused it permission to enter their airspace, leaving them with no clear route back home after a trip to Moscow. The plane subsequently landed in Austria because it needed to refuel, and Heinz Fischer, Austria’s president at the time, met with Morales at the airport.
The EU condemned Belarusian action against civil plane and the detention of Pratasevich. In a declaration on behalf of the EU on the forced diversion of Ryanair flight FR4978 to Minsk on 23 May 2021, the High Representative called for the immediate release of Mr Pratasevich. This was followed by a European Council statement, in which the EU leaders called for targeted individual and economic sanctions as well as to ban overflight of EU airspace by Belarusian airlines and prevent access to EU airports of flights operated by these.