Iran Monday begins its legal battle in the United Nations Supreme Court to release billions of dollars in US assets that Washington says must go to victims of terrorist attacks blamed on Tehran.
The case before the International Court of Justice comes amid fading hopes of relaunching a landmark deal – which former US President Donald Trump withdrew from in 2018 – aimed at taming Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Tehran took Washington to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2016 after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the freeze of around $2 billion in Iranian assets and ordered the money go to survivors and relatives of attacks who were killed blamed on the Islamic Republic.
These included the 1983 bombing of a US naval base in Beirut that killed 299 people, including 241 US soldiers, and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 people.
However, Iran said the freeze on funds violated the 1955 Treaty of Friendship with the United States, an agreement signed before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution severed ties between the countries.
Tehran argued that the United States had illegally seized Iranian financial assets and those of Iranian companies – and that with Iran’s clerical regime facing economic difficulties following sanctions and runaway consumer prices, resolving the case was crucial.
In turn, Washington had unsuccessfully tried to disqualify the lawsuit, arguing that Iran’s “unclean hands” – an indication of Tehran’s alleged support for terrorist groups – should disqualify its $2 billion asset recovery lawsuit.
The US announced its withdrawal from the friendship treaty in October 2018 after the International Court of Justice in a separate case ordered Washington to lift nuclear-related sanctions on humanitarian goods destined for Iran.
The ICJ is the supreme court of the United Nations and was established after World War II to settle disputes between member states. Its judgments are binding and cannot be appealed, but it has no means of enforcing them.
– Deadlocked conversations –
Monday’s hearing, to which U.S. officials will respond on Wednesday, comes as hopes are fading for a revival of a 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and the West that would grant Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program .
Former US President Donald Trump withdrew from what he called the “awful” international nuclear deal in 2018 and began re-imposing sanctions, prompting Tehran to back down on its commitments under the pact, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA to withdraw.
Talks have been underway in Vienna since April last year aimed at restoring the deal by once again lifting sanctions on Tehran and urging Iran to fully honor its commitments.
But European powers nine days ago expressed “serious doubts” about Iran’s sincerity in seeking a nuclear deal, adding that Tehran continues to “escalate its nuclear program well beyond any plausible civilian justification.”
The statement by France, Germany and Britain came a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assessed Iran’s latest response to the nuclear deal as a “step backwards”.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who has coordinated the talks for the past year and a half, told AFP last week the negotiations were at a “stalemate”.
Disputes with Iran include Tehran’s insistence that the UN nuclear regulatory agency complete an investigation into three undeclared sites suspected of past nuclear work.
