U.S. dumps 1955 Iran treaty after court eases sanctions

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Wednesday that the United States was pulling out of a 6-decade-old treaty with Iran that had provided a basis for normalizing relations between the two countries, including diplomatic and economic exchanges.

The largely symbolic move came hours after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered the U.S. to ease some of its recently imposed sanctions against Iran, including those related to the supply of humanitarian goods.

The court ruling was essentially an injunction related to a lawsuit filed by Iran that challenged a new round of U.S. economic sanctions imposed after President Donald Trump withdrew from a nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers in May. Iran is arguing in the lawsuit that the sanctions violated the decades-old treaty.

Pompeo cast the lawsuit as an attempt to interfere with the sovereign rights of the United States. He said that drove the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations and Consular Rights, which was signed in 1955.

“Iran is abusing the ICJ for political and propaganda purposes,” Pompeo said, adding that the court’s decision was outside its jurisdiction and that Iran’s appeals were “without merit.”

However, he said that the U.S. would continue to try to deliver humanitarian aid to the Iranian people, and that existing exceptions to the economic sanctions would remain in effect.

The decision by the court, at The Hague, came at a critical moment in the Trump administration’s effort to isolate Iran.

In early November, the United States is expected to impose a broad series of additional sanctions against Tehran that will threaten to cut off companies around the world that also do business with Iran.