UN court has jurisdiction to hear part of Iran-US dispute
Breaking Legal News - POSTED: 2019/02/13 19:13
Breaking Legal News - POSTED: 2019/02/13 19:13
The International Court of Justice ruled Wednesday that it has jurisdiction to hear part of a case brought by Iran against the United States that seeks to claw back around $2 billion worth of frozen Iranian assets.
The U.S. Supreme Court awarded the money to victims of a 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other attacks linked to Iran.
At hearings last year, the United States raised five objections to the court’s jurisdiction and the admissibility of the case, which Iran filed in 2016.
The ruling came amid high tensions between Washington and Tehran after President Donald Trump pulled America out of the nuclear deal last year.
The United Nations’ highest court upheld one U.S. objection to its jurisdiction, but it rejected another and said the third objection should be discussed at a later stage in the case. The judges also rejected two U.S. objections to the admissibility of the case.
The case will now proceed to the merits phase and is expected to take months or years to complete.
Tehran filed the case in 2016 based on the 1955 Treaty of Amity between Iran and the U.S., a bilateral agreement that Washington withdrew from last year.
The little-known treaty regulating commerce between the two countries was among numerous ones signed in the wake of World War II as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations tried to assemble a coalition of nations to counter the Soviet Union. It includes a clause that sends unresolved disputes about interpretation of the treaty to the world court.