Iran Court Passes $4.3 Billion Judgement Against US, Ex-Officials
A court in Iran has found the US government and many ex-officials responsible for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and demanded monetary compensation.
A court in Iran has found the US government and many ex-officials responsible for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists and demanded monetary compensation.
Iran’s High Council for Human Rights, which is part of the international affairs department of the judiciary, said on Thursday that the verdict was issued by Branch 55 of the Tehran Legal Court over Washington’s violations of international obligations through its support and assistance for Israel in committing “terrorist acts against nuclear scientists.”
IRNA said the lawsuit was filed by “the martyrs' families” over the physical, psychological and financial damage that they endured due to the killings.
According to the court ruling, $2.150 billion was due to the material and moral damages inflicted on the plaintiffs, and the same amount has been considered as punitive measures. The ruling, as reported by state media did not name the plaintiffs.
The move can be a belated reaction to many civil lawsuits in the United States seeking damages for Iran by those whose family members were killed in various acts of political violence, in which Iran had a direct or alleged role.
Until 2016, US courts had awarded plaintiffs a total of $56 billion to be paid by Iran or Iranian entities. A few more billions of dollars have been awarded since 2016.
Some have argued, that this large amounts of pending judgements against Iran is a factor in Iran’s calculations to reach a nuclear agreement to lift US sanctions. The monetary judgements could be a factor in deterring companies from investing in Iran or doing business with it even after sanctions would be lifted.
The defendants in the case are 37 American individuals and entities, including the US government, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the US National Security Agency, former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Assistant Secretary of State Brian Hook, and former Secretary of Defense Ashton B. Carter.
But the defendants have no assets under Iranian jurisdiction to be seized, and the move by the Tehran court, under the government’s political control, could be a bargaining ploy or simply a propaganda act for domestic audiences.
The US has played an effective role in “establishing, strengthening and supporting Israel as a terrorist regime,” and each year donates hundreds of millions of dollars in direct economic and military support to the regime, the court ruling read.
Over the past years, several Iranian nuclear scientists have been the target of assassinations, which Iran blames on Israel. Between 2010 and 2012, four Iranian nuclear scientists — Masoud Alimohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Darioush Rezaeinejad and Ahmadi Roshan — were assassinated, while another, Fereydoon Abbasi, was wounded in an attempted murder. Roshan was the head of a department at the Natanz nuclear facility and was assassinated by a magnetic bomb.
In the latest case, Iran blamed Israel for the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, said to be Iran’s top nuclear man, in November 2020 in a highly complicated operation east of the capital Tehran involving a remote-controlled one-ton automated weapon that had been smuggled into the country in pieces.
Iran has also accused Israel of sabotage operations against its nuclear facilities including an explosion in April 2021 that inflicted major damage to the Natanz uranium enrichment site.
Israel has never officially taken responsibility for any of these assassinations and sabotage operations but also has never denied involvement.
The meeting of the House of Commons subcommittee was held on Tuesday and attended by several political and human rights activists – including the spokesman of the Association of Families of Flight PS752 Victims, Hamed Esmaeilion.
Kasra Aarabi, a senior analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, who specializes in Iran and Shiite Islamist Extremism, said that currently Revolutionary Guard officers have key administerial roles in the government of President Ebrahim Raisi, which seeks to consolidate the Islamic Republic’s grip across the Middle East. “Raisi is mandated to purify the regime,” he said, adding that the IRGC is the force behind this change.
He mentioned Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi – an IRGC general wanted by Interpol for his suspected role in the 1994 AMIA Jewish center bombing in Argentina that killed 85 people and injured over 300 – and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian – for his alleged affiliation with IRGC’s Quds Force – as examples of such appointments.
“Domestically, the IRGC is preparing to unleash a new wave of Islamization on the Iranian people to eradicate Western and Persian aspects of the Iranian society,” he said, noting that the majority of Iranians want a secular government, manifested on the streets with protests “growing in size and scale.”
“The 1999 unrest took place in three cities and seven people were killed. In 2009, protests were in 10 cities and around 100 people were killed. Iran’s protests in November 2019, however, saw protests in over 100 towns and cities and as many as 1,500 civilians were killed in just a few days,” he added. “Canada can and should support the Iranian people,” he concluded.
Author Maral Karimi said social instability in Iran is going to get worse in the foreseeable future, highlighting that “Canada’s commitment to democracy within its borders and beyond make it a moral and political imperative to support the organic and democratic movements” such as protests by Iranian teachers, drivers, laborers, and other sectors of the society.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert, an academic previously jailed in Iran for over two years, also recounted her ordeal at the hands of IRGC in Islamic Republic’s prisons, as well as gross violations of human rights towards Iranian political prisoners.
Ali Ehsassi, a member of the House of Commons, underlined that the Revolutionary Guards are responsible for many horrific developments in the Middle East and the repression of civil society in Iran.
Another member of the House, Arnold Viersen, also criticized the government for not designating the Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization and not taking any specific action to hold it accountable for its crimes, including the intentional downing of the Ukraine Airlines Flight PS752.
The airliner was shot down by two air-defense missiles fired by the IRGC on January 8, 2020, as it took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport.
Esmaeilion, who lost his wife and daughter in the plane crash and has been campaigning for justice for the families of the victims ever since, said that 30 months have passed since the IRGC committed this “heinous crime over the skies of Tehran”, criticizing “Canada’s tepid and cautious approach to pursuing justice against the government of Iran.”
Not only has the Islamic Republic refused to cooperate to shed light on the incident, but also “it has systematically lied and misled to successfully impede the emergence of the factual matrix that led to this crime,” he said.
"Apart from deliberately obfuscating [the investigations], the Iranian government and the IRGC have subjected the relatives of the victims to crushing psychological pressure,” Esmaeilion said.
The inflation rate reported by the Statistical Center of Iran (SCI) pertained to point-to-point calculation of rising prices, comparing the last Iranian calendar month of Khordad that ended June 20 with the same month in 2021.
Based on figures announced by SCI on June 22, overall point-to-point inflation rose by 52.5 percent, while non-food goods and services rose by 36.8 percent compared to the same month in 2021.
In early May, the government decided to end food import subsidies in place since 2018, that was allegedly abused by corrupt officials and businessmen to divert cheap dollars provided by the government, for non-essential imports.
The program of import subsidies cost the government $9-15 billion a year, depending on widely diverging figures quoted by different officials.
When the Iranian rial began to nosedive in early 2018, the government decided to offer cheap dollars for importing essential goods and commodities, such as wheat, animal feed, medicines, and a range of other items.
But rial’s decline continued without reprieve with the currency losing value ninefold by April 2022, as United States’ sanctions on Iranian oil exports and international banking imposed in 2018 continued.
Compared with the previous month this year (April21-May 20), the inflation index rose by 13.2 percent. But the shocking price jump was for the food sector with a 36.8 percent jump in one month.
However, the most politically significant and sensitive price increases were for cooking oil, bread and cereals.
Cooking oil jumped by 200 percent in one month and 250 percent compared with the same month in 2021. Bread and cereals jumped by 93.8 percent in one year and almost 20 percent compared to the previous 30-day period.
Dairy prices jumped by 47 percent in one month and 111 percent in one year.
However, the numbers published by the SCI still might not convey the real picture of rising prices. For example, in case of rents, the report showed an annual increase of 31.7 percent, while other reports speak of up to 100 percent rise in rental fees in the past few months, driving some lower middle class families into homelessness.
Protests began immediately in May after the government announced the elimination of food subsidies and have continued almost daily since then. Even government-controlled media are slamming the presidential administration for what they say is mismanagement of the economy.
Around 80 percent of the economy is directly or indirectly controlled by the state, which leads to planning nightmares, nepotism, political favoritism and corruption.
What helped the Islamic Republic to muddle through in past decades was oil export income, which has been significantly reduced by US sanctions imposed when the Trump administration withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the JCPOA.
Year-long negotiations to revive the agreement have not succeeded, reportedly by Iran’s insistence for removal of sanctions imposed on its Revolutionary Guard, which is accused among other things of supporting terrorism.
With sanctions in place and an economy burdened by inefficiency, Iran’s financial situation will likely remain dismal, making the political atmosphere unstable in the country.