International Court of Justice Sides With the Mullahs

FPM: During his address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, President Trump rejected the notion of global governance institutions purporting to override national sovereignty. President Trump called out the International Criminal Court, which “has no legitimacy or authority,” he said. The president vowed to “never surrender America’s sovereignty” to such an “unelected, unaccountable” globalist body. The UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, has just rendered a decision against the United States and in favor of Iran that demonstrates why President Trump is so correct. The ICJ judges ruled that some sanctions imposed by the Trump administration on the Iranian regime were inconsistent with the “Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights” between Iran and the United States, which was signed in Tehran in 1955 and entered into force in 1957. The ICJ disgracefully relied on this treaty to both assert jurisdiction over Iran’s complaint, and to decide at least provisionally in Iran’s favor on the merits. It ordered the immediate removal of U.S. sanctions on certain products for import into Iran, pending the court’s final decision in the case. President Trump must, as he is expected to do, disregard this disgraceful ruling, and any follow-on rulings. The ICJ decision is an affront to the United States’ sovereign right to decide what nations it chooses to do business with and which countries it decides not to do business with, for whatever reasons it chooses including national security.

Following the ICJ ruling, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States would cancel the treaty that anachronistically still includes “Amity” and “Consular Rights” in its title. That’s good, but unnecessary. The treaty is already dead as a result of the Iranian Islamist regime’s own gross violations of the treaty itself and of conventional international law principles, capped by the unlawful seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the detention of hostages under inhumane conditions by the regime’s supporters in 1979, which the regime endorsed.  read more