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| Two American Lawyers Defend Iran’s Right at Federal Court | ||||||||||
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Two American lawyers have officially been appointed by Chicago University and Iran to represent Iran at US Court and defend its right over ancient Persian tablets loaned to the University. | |||||||||
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Tehran, 19 July 2007 (CHN Foreign Desk) -- It seems that after more than two decades of cloudy political relations between Iran and the United States, the two countries have now come together and became allies to defend Iranian cultural heritage and have teamed up to assert Iran’s right over the priceless collection of Persian artifacts at the American courts. Chicago attorney Michael McCormick has filed legal papers to represent Iran after we was asked by Chicago University to get involved with the case. On the other hand, Iran hired Washington lawyer, Thomas Corcoran, to help McCormick win the battle at Court. After an American Federal Judge ordered to confiscate the invaluable collection of Persian tablets loaned to Chicago University’s Oriental Institute and put them on auction to compensate Israeli victims of the1997 Jerusalem bombing, a feeling of anger aroused not only among the Iranians who are seeing their ancient heritage at a real risk, but also among many other people worrying that by placing these ancient relics on auction, they will be lost forever. This decision shocked the University of Chicago who announced its readiness to fight the case in the court on behalf of Iran. The University hired some lawyers who have been endeavoring to prove that the collection is protected by the doctrine of Sovereign Immunity. However, this was rejected first by a magistrate judge and then Judge Blanche M. Manning, both of whom sit on a federal court in Chicago. The principle of Sovereign Immunity holds that a government can not be hauled into court like an ordinary citizen. Nonetheless, the University of Chicago did not give up and has promised to defense Iran’s right to the ownership of these historical relics by dispatching some attorneys to the court and returning the inscriptions back to their homeland. “There is absolutely no justification for this. It’s a bizarre, almost surreal kind of thing,” said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. “The Iranians are absolutely furious about this. You would have to imagine how we would feel if we loaned the Liberty Bell to Russia and a Russian court put it up for auction,” added Prof. Stein. On Monday, Chicago Tribune reported that the University of Chicago finally found a legal alley-Iran in an uphill effort to keep a priceless collection of Persian antiquities from being seized and sold by a federal court as compensation for a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Last week, State Department lawyers and Washington attorney for Iran contended in Chicago’s federal courthouse to defend Iranian artifacts. Both sides are claiming victory in this latest development in a case whose twists and turns have been closely watched by the American museum world. Previously, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Manouchehr Mottaki, had described the case as an indecent cultural move by the United States. He also mentioned that if Federal Court approved the sale, Iran could make retaliatory legal claims against the United States for supporting the 1953 coup in Tehran and backing Iraq during the deadly 1980s Iran-Iraq war. To prevent such thing from happening, Iranian officials finally decided to come out of recess by appointing Washington lawyer Thomas Corcoran to defend Iran’s right in the American Federal court. “Things were looking bad for Iranians. Iran asked me to note an appearance to assert Iran’s immunities,” said Corcoran. Patty Gerstenblith, a cultural property law specialist at DePaul University, said to Washington Post that when Corcoran appeared in the court last week as Iran’s representative, the case’s dynamics shifted. “It changes things pretty dramatically. If foreign sovereign immunity can be asserted, the case should be more or less resolved. If Iran wins on this case, I think the other cases are blown out of the water,” quoted WP Gerstenblith as saying. The events go back to September 1997 when three suicide bombers detonated their explosives in the crowded Ben Yehuda marketplace in Israel which left five dead and more than 100 injuries, including a number of foreign tourists. The Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, took the responsibility for the attack. Six years later in Washington, US District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that a group of bombing victims and surviving relatives could claim $ 423.5 million in damages from Iran as a sponsor of Hamas. The award included 300 million dollar in punitive damages. Strachman, who filed suit in 2004 on behalf of his clients, targeted other holdings gathered from Iran by the Institute and the nearby Field Museum. “We are seeking to enforce the judgment that was warded to my client,” said Strachman. He also said if his clients win, University of Chicago’s collection wouldn’t be lost to the world of scholarship. “Other museums and institutions have expressed an interest in acquiring the material. My clients are not in the archeology business,” added Strachman. This way the Oriental Institute and its holdings from Persepolis, the capital of ancient Persia, became a primary target. Excavated by a leading institute archeologist in the early 1930s, the tablets are considered a remarkable record of daily transactions from 2500 years ago. Each text is about half the size of a deck of cards and bears characters in a dialect of Elamite, understood by perhaps a dozen scholars in the world. Stressing the high value of these inscriptions, Stein said to Washington Post that the tablets basically tell you how the Persian Empire worked. While much knowledge of ancient Persia came from the accounts of others, most famously the Greek storyteller Herodotus, Stein called the tablets “the first chance to hear the Persians speaking of their own empire.” “It is valuable because it is a group of tablets, thousands of them from the same archive. It's like the same filing cabinet. They're very, very valuable scientifically,” Stein said to WP. He said the details largely concern food for people on diplomatic or military missions. Thousands of ancient clay tablets containing information about the life and language of the people of the Persian Empire were discovered in Persepolis, Iran in 1933 by archeologists of the Oriental Institute of Chicago University and lent to this institute nearly seventy years ago for further studies and decoding. Experts have painstakingly pieced together and deciphered many of the texts, with the understanding that they would later be retuned to Iran. The institute had retuned 37,000 tablets and fragments to Iran and was preparing another shipment when Strachman intervened. After all, Professor Stein believes that these artifacts which reflect a part of Iran’s ancient history and are valuable documents about ancient Persia must be returned to their home country. In a letter sent to Iran’s cultural heritage authorities, Gil Stein has promised that University of Chicago will do its best to redeem them and send them safety back to Iran through legal organizations. He also believes that auctioning the Persian historical artifacts will also bring the reliability of the United States under question. “Would Egypt loan the treasures of King Tut if they thought they could be seized by anyone who had a beef with the government of Egypt?” he asked adding that “Scholarship depends on the ability to trust each other to work above the level of politics and infighting. The whole structure of scholarly collaboration would fall apart, and the whole world would be very much the poorer for it.” Sources: • Washington Post • Chicago Tribune foreigndesk@chn.ir “Persian Artifacts, Victims of Political Crisis” “Chicago University Promises to Defend Iran’s Right at Court” |
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