In a noteworthy legal development, a judicial tribunal in Tehran has issued a verdict mandating the United States government to disburse $330 million in compensation for purportedly orchestrating a coup against the nascent Islamic republic in 1980. This edict was proclaimed by the judiciary on Saturday.
Following the momentous 1979 Islamic revolution that dismantled the reign of the US-supported Shah, a contingent primarily comprising military officers embarked on a venture to destabilize the emergent administration.
According to the state news agency IRNA, this group of “insurgents,” led by the former Iranian air force commander Saeed Mahdiyoun, established their base of operations at Nojeh, an air base situated in the Hamedan province of the western region. The attempted insurrection culminated in confrontations between the coup plotters and government forces, resulting in fatalities and numerous detentions.
IRNA disclosed that the coup plotters aspired to commandeer military installations across the nation, strategically target pivotal centers, and occupy the dwellings of the revolutionary leaders. Nonetheless, their machinations were thwarted.
Subsequently, in the preceding year, individuals connected to those who perished during the upheaval filed a formal legal petition with Iran’s International Court, petitioning for reparations. This initiative aimed to hold the United States accountable for purportedly “designing and executing” the coup.
The adjudicatory panel ruled favorably on this claim, decreeing that the American government should remit $30 million in compensatory damages, encompassing both tangible and intangible losses, and an additional $300 million as punitive damages.
Of notable import is the absence of diplomatic relations between Tehran and Washington since the aftermath of the seminal 1979 revolution.
The historical backdrop is also pertinent; in 1953, British and US intelligence agencies orchestrated the ousting of then-prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had orchestrated the nationalization of Iran’s lucrative oil sector.
In a preceding instance, in 2016, the US Supreme Court ordered the allocation of Iranian assets frozen within the United States to victims of attacks attributed to Tehran by Washington, including the 1983 bombing of a US Marine barracks in Beirut and a 1996 explosion in Saudi Arabia.
During the current year’s inception, the International Court of Justice proclaimed the US’s seizure of assets belonging to several Iranian entities and individuals to be “manifestly unreasonable,” while conceding its lack of jurisdiction to unfreeze nearly $2 billion in Iranian central bank holdings suspended by the United States.
Tehran, consistently disavowing any culpability for attacks ascribed to it by the United States, asserts that a sequence of court rulings has awarded victims a cumulative sum of $56 billion in compensatory claims.