Six months into the Iran war, accountability is being treated like a bargaining chip. It’s a legal question, and the law already has what it needs to answer it.
Six months after the strikes of February 28, 2026, the war with Iran has settled into something that is neither war nor peace: a naval blockade, a closed strait, talks that stall and start again.
Tehran wants reparations before it will reopen the Strait of Hormuz; Washington answers with compensation claims reaching back over four decades. Accountability is being negotiated away like another line in the deal.
It doesn’t belong there. What the Islamic Republic has done to Israel, and to its own people, is a matter for courts, not diplomacy – and courts don’t wait on anyone’s signature.
That’s the argument behind The Tehran Docket, a new study for the Kohelet Policy Forum mapping 23 legal avenues against the regime. All of them rest on one observation: the alibi Tehran has hidden behind since 1979 no longer holds.
The alibi is familiar. Iran fights through others: it funds Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, arms Hezbollah, equips the Houthis, sponsors Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, and keeps enough distance from the bloodshed to claim, afterward, that the hands were never its own.
As diplomacy, this has worked for nearly half a century. As law, it is failing.
Tehran’s lawyers have a real point: international law doesn’t hold a state responsible for a proxy’s crimes just because it arms and funds them.
It demands proof of “effective control” – direction over the specific attack – a bar the World Court set decades ago in the Nicaragua case. Iran will say, correctly, that Hamas is not its army; a case pretending otherwise would lose.
But effective control isn’t the only door. A state that knowingly bankrolls, arms, and trains a group whose attacks on civilians would be illegal if it committed them directly doesn’t get to wash its hands of the result.
Hosting counts, too: Iran houses Hamas offices, trains Hezbollah fighters, and stocks proxy weapons on its own soil – a violation, the World Court held in 1949, of the rule against letting your territory be used to attack another country.
A regime whose leaders praised the October 7 massacre within days has built a record of its own.
None of this is even necessary for Iran’s own conduct, where there is no proxy to hide behind. Ballistic missile barrages hit Israeli territory in April 2024, October 2024, June 2025, and again this past February and March.
One of them flattened a public shelter in Beit Shemesh on March 1, killing nine people.
Iranian operatives have plotted assassinations on European soil; prisoners have been executed for “espionage for Israel.” Some of these strikes could amount to war crimes under the treaty creating the International Criminal Court.
Nor does it end with a change of leadership: Ali Khamenei died on February 28; his office’s immunity simply passed to his son. The state’s responsibility does not change hands.
Some of these avenues move faster than others.
The quickest is the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which needs no exhaustion of Iranian remedies and typically rules within six to 12 months – Ahmadreza Djalali, on death row since 2017, should be the first case filed.
National courts come next: seven countries, from Germany to Argentina, have prosecuted Iranian officials under universal jurisdiction. ar
Sweden showed what’s possible when it sentenced Hamid Nouri to life in 2022 – and how Tehran responded, freeing him in 2024 for two Swedish nationals. That’s a risk worth planning for, not a reason to hold back.
Civil lawsuits have gone furthest of all.
American courts have ordered Iran to pay damages for the Beirut barracks bombing, Khobar Towers, and the AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires; the Supreme Court upheld collecting straight from Iran’s central bank assets.
At the far end sits the International Court of Justice itself: Iran signed the Genocide Convention without exempting itself from suit, and a 2020 ruling involving Myanmar confirmed that any signatory state may bring such a case.
UN's bias against Israel
The obvious objection is that the UN is biased against Israel. It is – Israel remains the only country with a standing item on the Human Rights Council’s agenda.
I don’t dispute that; I want to use it. Bring these bodies an irreproachable case against Iran and make them apply their own standard. If they do, Tehran finally faces accountability. If they hesitate, that too proves the critics right.
A court judgment outlives any deal – no negotiator can undo it with a signature. These cases must be filed now, while the evidence is fresh and before a settlement quietly writes off what’s owed.
The machinery exists. What’s been missing is the will to use it.
The writer is an international law researcher at the Kohelet Policy Forum.