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2.7 World Court rules it has jurisdiction to hear Iran claim to recover $1.75bn of assets seized by US
Judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on February 13 ruled that the UN body has jurisdiction to hear a claim by Iran to recover $1.75bn in assets frozen by Washington.
The ruling opens the way for the court to hear the case on its merits. The process could take years and there is also the prospect that the US, on past form, will simply ignore any decision that goes against it.
The case filed in June 2016 is focused on assets from the Iranian central bank (or Bank Markazi) seized by US courts to compensate families of victims of a 1983 bombing of a US Marine Corps base in Beirut which Washington blames on Iran. Iran denies involvement in the attack which killed 307 people, including 241 US military personnel.
The US argued to the ICJ that Iran based its claims on an outdated 1955 Amity Treaty which Washington has said it will renounce. Iran has also argued that the heavy sanctions imposed against it by President Donald Trump last year also violate terms of the treaty.
In making its ruling, The Hague-based World Court also rejected pleas from Washington that Tehran would use the money to fund terrorism, AFP reported. Chief judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf said the court "unanimously rejects the preliminary objections to admissibility raised by the United States of America.”
Tehran has protested at what it sees as the US illegally seizing assets, the form of which includes high-rise buildings in Manhattan purchased by Iran’s last Shah before the 1979 revolution.
The US Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that Iran must give the money to survivors and relatives of victims of attacks it concluded were devised by Tehran, including the Beirut bombing and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
The ICJ was set up after World War II to resolve disputes between UN member states. Its rulings are binding and cannot be appealed, but it has no means of enforcing them.
2.8 Polls & Sociology
Iran’s standing on Heritage’s Index of Economic Freedom little changed
Iran’s standing on the 2019 edition of The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom has improved by 0.2 of a point compared to the 2018 ranking, leaving the country with 51.1 points and ranked as the 155th most free of the 180 assessed nations.
The Islamic Republic also placed 155th on the index two years ago, when i t moved out of the “Repressed” category for economic liberty and into the “Mostly Unfree” section.
Rather than economic reform in the past year, Iran’s focus has essentially
11 IRAN Country Report March 2019 www.intellinews.com