A Washington federal judge yesterday awarded $338 million to the victims of a terrorist kidnapping, finding that the Syrian government was liable for supporting the group behind the abduction.
According to the opinion (PDF) from U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, Marvin Wilson and Ronald Wyatt were taken hostage in Turkey in 1991 while visiting a possible archaeological site. They were held for 21 days before being released by their captors.
Lamberth found that the Syrian government provided material support and funding to the group behind the abduction, the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Under the state-sponsored terrorism exception to the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities, Lamberth awarded damages to Wilson, Wilson's family and Wyatt's family; Wyatt died of cancer in 1999.
"The brutal character of the kidnapping in this case, the significant harm it caused both the hostage plaintiffs and their families, along with Syria's demonstrated and well known policy to encourage terrorism all merit an award of punitive damages," Lamberth wrote.
A lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Robert Tolchin of The Berkman Law Office in Brooklyn, N.Y., could not immediately be reached today for comment.
The Syrian government has not participated in the case except to assert their sovereign immunity against litigation in a U.S. court; they unsuccessfully pursued a motion to dismiss. Still, the Syrian government’s attorney, Ramsey Clark of Clark & Schilling in New York, said today that he thought the judgment “seemed excessive under any circumstances.”
One day these precedents are gonna come back for you.
The US and Canadian courts continue to allow successful litigation against other governments/states.
It will only be a matter of time until a team of Iranian-American lawyers sue US state and fed govts. Ditto Palestinians, Nicaraguans, Panamanians, Chileans, and basically the entire non-white world.
Of course, those cases will fail. But that's exactly it now isn't it? Once it is popularly perceived that the courts are as rotten as the government, well people won't have legal recourse now will they? It reminds of of what JFK once said, something along the lines of 'those who make peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable'.
The 03 Iraq war alone was such a flagrant violation that, well, approximately 1 to 2 million dead Iraqis. Someone's gonna pay right? Might as well start to use the precedents like the one above in the article.
Of course this is all speculation. But you know, both Ghandi and Mandela both led revolts once they proved the courts to be pawns of tyrants. In this case, NOT winning the case still results in an avenue towards victory. Either way, your hands are tied....at least, one may speculate so
Posted by: h | December 19, 2012 at 02:01 AM