Certain Iranian Assets (Iran v. United States)

Certain Iranian Assets (Iran v. United States) is a contentious case decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 30 March 2023, arising from United States legislative and judicial measures that froze, attached, and made available for execution assets belonging to Iran and Iranian state-owned entities. Iran filed its application on 14 June 2016, invoking as the sole basis of jurisdiction Article XXI(2) of the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights between the two states—a Cold War-era commercial treaty that survived the 1979 rupture in diplomatic relations and supplied the jurisdictional hook for several Iran–U.S. proceedings. The dispute targeted U.S. instruments including Section 201 of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act as amended (notably 28 U.S.C. §1610), and the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012, together with Executive Order 13599 (2012). The central factual trigger was the U.S. Supreme Court's 2016 decision in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, which permitted roughly US$1.75 billion in Bank Markazi (the Central Bank of Iran) assets to satisfy judgments held by victims of attacks attributed to Iran.

Procedurally, the case unfolded in the standard ICJ sequence. Iran lodged its memorial; the United States responded not with a counter-memorial on the merits but with preliminary objections challenging jurisdiction and admissibility. In its Judgment of 13 February 2019 the Court resolved those objections, rejecting most U.S. arguments but upholding one of decisive consequence: that Bank Markazi, in its capacity as a central bank, was not a "company" within the meaning of Articles III, IV, and V of the Treaty of Amity, because those provisions protect entities engaged in commercial activity. The Court also reserved for the merits the U.S. objection that the Treaty did not cover sovereign immunity questions at all. The merits phase then proceeded through written pleadings and oral hearings, culminating in the 2023 Judgment.

The 2023 ruling produced a split outcome that defined the case's significance. The Court held that the Treaty of Amity contains no provision conferring or governing sovereign immunity, and therefore Iran's central claim—that the United States violated customary international law on state immunity by stripping immunity from Iranian assets—fell outside the Court's treaty-based jurisdiction. This reasoning, combined with the 2019 finding on Bank Markazi's status, removed the most valuable category of assets from the Court's reach. Yet the Court found that the United States had breached several Treaty provisions, including Articles III(1), IV(1), IV(2), and X(1), with respect to other Iranian companies whose assets had been attached, and it ordered the United States to pay compensation, the amount to be settled by negotiation or, failing agreement, by a further proceeding.

The case sits within a cluster of contemporary Iran–U.S. and Tehran–Washington litigation before the Peace Palace. It is closely related to Oil Platforms (Iran v. United States), decided in 2003, and to the Alleged Violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity case Iran brought in 2018 after the U.S. reimposition of sanctions following withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. On 3 October 2018—amid these proceedings—the U.S. Department of State, then under Secretary Mike Pompeo, announced that the United States was terminating the 1955 Treaty altogether, though termination did not affect jurisdiction over disputes already crystallized. The Court's registry at The Hague processed the parallel matters with overlapping legal teams and arguments, making the asset case part of a coordinated Iranian litigation strategy.

Certain Iranian Assets must be distinguished from the doctrine of state immunity as such, and from the related concept of the terrorism exception to immunity. State immunity is a customary-law rule shielding states and their property from the jurisdiction of foreign courts; the U.S. terrorism exception in the FSIA carves out states designated as sponsors of terrorism. The ICJ did not adjudicate whether that exception itself conforms to customary international law—a question that distinguishes this case from a pure immunity dispute such as Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy), decided in 2012, where the Court squarely applied customary immunity rules. Here the jurisdictional gateway was a bilateral commercial treaty, so the Court confined itself to treaty obligations and declined the broader immunity question.

The Judgment generated controversy on multiple fronts. Iran characterized the compensation award as vindication, while the United States emphasized that the Court had upheld the attachment of the Bank Markazi funds and rejected the immunity claim. Commentators debated whether the 2019 ruling that a central bank is not a "company" was a sound reading of commercial-treaty language or an artificial narrowing that insulated the largest U.S. measures from scrutiny. The unresolved quantum of compensation, left to negotiation between two states with no diplomatic relations, raised the familiar problem of enforceability: like other ICJ judgments, it depends on state compliance rather than coercive execution, and the prior U.S. treaty termination signaled limited appetite for cooperative settlement.

For the working practitioner, Certain Iranian Assets is a reference point on the reach and limits of compromissory clauses in old commercial treaties, the interaction between domestic sanctions architecture and international obligations, and the boundary between treaty-based and customary-law claims at the ICJ. Desk officers handling sanctions enforcement, asset-recovery litigators, and immunity specialists draw on it to gauge how far a bilateral instrument can be stretched to reach sovereign-property disputes, and how a court will sever immunity questions from contractual protections. It also illustrates the durability of dormant treaties as jurisdictional vehicles long after political relations collapse.