19 Mar 2024
Saturday 18 November 2017 - 18:00
Story Code : 283632

UK-Iran debt settlement purely legal: professor

Trend News Agency- A recent arrangement by UK government to pay back Iran over an unaccomplished arms deal is purely legal and with no political considerations, an international law professor says.

The UK government has recently announced it is going to pay Iran 450 million pounds outstanding debt - owed for a cancelled arms deal in the 1970s, where the UK received the sum but did not deliver the Chieftain tanks and other weaponry it must have when a regime change occurred in Iran in 1979.

Many British news outlets, however, have accused the government of trying to pay this sum as ransom to free Iranian-British national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from Iranian custody.

Zaghari has been detained in Iran since April 3, 2016. On September 10, 2016, it was revealed that she was sentenced to five years imprisonment on charge of activities against the Islamic Republic.

The prosecutor general of Tehran had stated in October 2017 that she was being held for running "a BBC Persian online journalism course which was aimed at recruiting and training people to spread propaganda against Iran".

British media, however, had introduced Zaghari as a charity worker.

Recently Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson told a parliamentary inquiry that Zaghari had been working in Tehran, teaching journalism, when she was arrested.

British media saw this as a horrific gaffe by Johnson, saying it could prove Iran right in its claims against Zaghari and earn her a longer prison term.

The news outlets now claim the government is going to alleviate pressure by freeing Zaghari by way of the 450 million pound payment.

The prime minister's spokesperson, however, has denied the payment has anything to do with Mrs Zagharis case, saying, We are clear that we don't see any link between these two issues. That's not something I recognize.

Yousof Molaee, an international law professor at the University of Tehran, told Trend November 18 that the settlement of this debt is purely legal.

There have been many other deals between Iran and the UK, such as in construction, industries, and mines. Following the revolution all of them either were revoked or stalled.

He noted that Iran has in the years after the revolution filed many suits with international courts to receive its sums of money back from the UK.

The settlement has taken so long first because of the legal procedures that are naturally there, then because of sanctions which prevented transfer of money to Iran. So the problems that had kept the payment so far have been mainly technical rather than political, Molaee noted.
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