Law and Diplomacy in Light of the Jurisdiction of Islamic Republic of Iran's Courts Act for Adjudicating Civil Litigations against Foreign States and Related Acts of the U.S.A

Owing to their diplomatic nature, both the Jurisdiction of Iranian Courts’ Act and the Terrorism Exception to Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of the U.S.A use notions with different implications which may accompany with political orientations. The foregoing Acts lack transparency, uniformity and predictability in legislative and also in execution phases. Hence, the nature of these Acts have been transformed from a set of legal rules to phenomena which instead of creating a uniform principle for similar situations, build a tool dealing with political disparities. These Acts fail to meet traits of legal norms including “generality, commonness and permanency”. As a matter of fact, these Acts are alternative tools which have been chosen among others in lieu of the use of force by States. The aforementioned Acts have not been adopted to organize the relations among States and include only targeted States. These Acts are conditional and include only States defined as sponsors of terrorism. Finally, they are not permanent and exist only until the description of “sponsored terrorism” remains or, at last, until the relations among State become normal. It is evident that they have no intention to create a legal rule governing the normal situations. However, in their lifetime, they generate bad effects, malpractice and hazardous jurisprudence. The abovementioned consideration has somehow been confirmed in the case of Jurisdictional Immunities of the States, Germany v. Italy by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recognizing the U.S.A Acts as not a settled practice. Hence, scrutinizing the Acts just from a legal or diplomatic prospect may not create reliable consequences. Therefore this survey studies them from an upper horizon which includes non-legal and judicial aspects.