By Haggai Carmon

In a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the grandson of an assassinated Iranian general has been granted the right to have additional hearings on a foreign sovereignty case that was originally dismissed by a D.C. District Court judge in 2007. The Appeals Court judge has ruled that French law be consulted in determining damages.

Amir Reza Oveissi’s grandfather was murdered on a busy street in Paris in 1984. The terrorist group Hezbollah took responsibility for the killing, and the California-born Oveissi brought suit against Iran and its Ministry of Information and Security in 2003. He argued that the murder of his grandfather had been a terrorist act sponsored by the state of Iran, a country officially recognized in the U.S. as a state sponsor of terror. He sought and is still seeking damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress and wrongful death.

The case was originally dismissed because the grandfather – General Gholam Ali Oveissi – was a citizen of Iran and so he, if he had survived the attack, would not have been able to sue Iran under the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, as his grandson is now doing. Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that under California law, Oveissi could not proceed. Even though Judge Lamberth found Iran responsible for the elder Oveissi’s death, he did not believe that damages could be procured through the U.S. court system.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, however, ruled that because the plaintiff was living in France at the time of the shooting, it should be French law – not California law – that be applied when determining damages.

By Haggai Carmon

When the 1996 amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) made State Sponsors of Terror liable to civil suits in the U.S., there was a catch. Victims of terror couldn’t sue a country, they had to identify “an official, employee, or agent of a foreign state designated as a state sponsor of terrorism.”

In 2008, this catch was removed by the National Defense Authorization Act. Following its passage, victims of terrorist acts and their survivors would, in theory, be entitled to financial reparations from the state sponsor of terrorism itself.

In Gates v. Syrian Arab Republic, this amendment was put to the test and upheld by Judge Rosemary Collyer, who ruled on September 26, 2008 to award the plaintiffs more than $400 million in damages.

The plaintiffs in the case were the survivors of Jack Armstrong and Jack Hensley, who were both working as civilian contractors in Iraq when they were kidnapped and subsequently murdered by the Al Qaeda in Iran (AQI) leader Abu Musan al-Zarqawi. A video was made of their beheading, which was posted on the Internet.

The lawsuit found Syria responsible for providing not only financial support to AQI, but also a safe base from which to train, organize and penetrate/exit Iraq.

By Haggai Carmon

In early 2008, Abdel Diallo, the son of UN Diplomat Hama Diallo (Executive Secretary of the Permanent Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification), was found guilty of first-degree assault and the use of a handgun in the commission of a violent crime.

A. Diallo’s appeal, in Diallo v. Maryland, relied on the fact that his father’s diplomatic immunity should carry over to him, but the State of Maryland appellate court upheld the conviction made by the circuit court of Baltimore County.

Hama Diallo was based in Bonn, Germany at the time, and although he did come to the U.S. fairly frequently on official UN business, he was not actually present in the U.S. at the time of his son’s infraction (October 2006). What he did have was a G-4 visa, valid from April 20, 2006 through April 18, 2007, which allowed him to travel to the U.S. as a foreign diplomat on official business.

The appellate court ruled that neither under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Conventions, nor under the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations did Abdel Diallo have claim to diplomatic immunity from his 25-year prison sentence.

If his father had been physically in the United States, on official UN business, at the time of the offense, Abdel Diallo may today be a free man.