The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a judgement which would allow victims of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and other terrorist attacks to collect nearly $2 billion from the frozen assets of an Iranian government-owned bank in the United States.
By ruling 6-2 in favour of the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing and victims of other attacks which U.S. courts had linked to Iran, the Supreme Court decided that the U.S. Congress had not exceeded its authority when it passed a law in 2012 which specifically targeted frozen Iran assets in the United States.
“(The law) provides a new standard clarifying that, if Iran owns certain assets, the victims of Iran-sponsored terrorist attacks will be permitted to execute against those assets,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote on behalf of the majority.
The case involved 1.75 billion dollars worth of assets owned by Iran’s Bank Markazi and held by Citibank in New York.
The bank had claimed that the Congress had overstepped into a matter that should have been decided by the U.S. judiciary system.