Iran's Araghchi says US-Israeli strikes violate international law in Kyodo op-ed
Iran's foreign minister argued in a Japanese newspaper that the attacks on his country breached the UN Charter and threaten the legal order built after World War Two.
By Grace Almasi ·
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has accused the United States and Israel of violating the core principles of international law through their strikes on Iran, making his case in an opinion piece written for Japan's Kyodo News.
"If states were free to attack one another based on their own assessments of possible future threats, what would be left of the international legal order?" Araghchi asked in the piece. "This question goes well beyond the political dispute between Iran and the United States."
The foreign minister framed the issue as one that strikes at the foundations of the global system. "It concerns one of the fundamental principles on which the international order established after the Second World War rests: the use of force is governed by law, and no state, however powerful, is entitled to place its own judgment above binding rules of international law," the article read.
Araghchi said the US-Israeli strikes amounted to a clear violation of the prohibition on the use of force and an infringement of Iran's sovereignty. He insisted that the legal merits of the operation could not be settled by arguments made after the fact.
"Their legality must be assessed against the U.N. Charter and established principles of international law, not against political arguments or justifications advanced after military operations have begun," he wrote.
The top Iranian diplomat said Washington had neither obtained authorisation from the UN Security Council nor established grounds for invoking self-defence under Article 51 of the charter, which permits the use of force only in response to an armed attack.
Araghchi also pointed to the targets hit during the strikes. He said attacks on schools, sports stadiums, civilian infrastructure and Iranian nuclear facilities subject to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards raise further questions under international law and must be examined under international humanitarian law.
The foreign minister promoted the opinion piece on his X account on Thursday, writing that it addressed "the need to uphold international law as war criminals try to destroy it" and repeating his question about what would remain of the international legal order if states could attack each other based on their own threat assessments.
The op-ed is part of Tehran's broader diplomatic effort to challenge the legality of the strikes in international forums and to rally support for its position that the military campaign breached binding rules of international law.
