US urges UN court to toss out Iranian frozen assets case

The United States urges the International Court of Justice to throw out a case brought by Iran seeking to claw back around $2 billion worth of frozen Iranian assets that the US Supreme Court awarded to victims of a 1983 bombing in Lebanon and other attacks linked to Tehran.

The leader of the US legal team, Richard Visek, tells the UN court that it should invoke, for the first time, a legal principle known as “unclean hands,” under which a nation can’t bring a case because of its own criminal actions linked to the case.

“Iran’s case should be dismissed in its entirety based on the principle of unclean hands,” Visek tells the judges sitting in the court’s Great Hall of Justice.

“The essence of this threshold defense is that Iran’s own egregious conduct, its sponsorship of terrorist acts directed against the United States and US nationals, lies at the very core of its claims,” Visek said.

The Hague-based court has never used the “unclean hands” defense as a reason to toss out a case, but it has been successfully cited in international arbitration cases, Visek said.