Iraqi Jews sue France again over Baghdad mansion used as embassy

A Jewish family of Iraqi origin is suing the French government for €21.5 million over its use of their former family home in Baghdad as the French Embassy for decades.

The family claims France stopped paying rent to the property's owners in 1974 and instead transferred the equivalent sums to the Iraqi authorities, Caliber.Az reports, citing foreign media.

The case concerns a building known as Beit Lawee, owned by brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, members of Iraq's Jewish community who emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s.

The 3,800-square-metre building, on a 1,150-square-metre plot, was leased to France in 1964, with the agreement taking effect in 1965.

According to documents presented by the French Foreign Ministry, France later began signing leases with the Iraqi authorities after the original owners had been stripped of their property under Iraqi legislation concerning Jews who had left the country.

The family's lawyers, Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi, argue that France bears responsibility for what they describe as the loss of their clients' property rights.

“This dispossession of Jewish property was carried out with the cooperation of the Foreign Ministry. France bears responsibility,” they said in the civil lawsuit filed in Paris.

The lawyers said their clients were “dispossessed” as a result of “a unilateral measure of an antisemitic nature taken by the Iraqi authorities, which the French state complied with without raising any objection.”

They also described the family's “feeling that they were abandoned, even betrayed, by their tenant, the French Republic, which in their eyes was supposed to be entrusted with defending the highest principles of human rights.”

The descendants of the Lawee and Khazam families have also appealed against an earlier ruling by the Paris Administrative Court.

In February, the court ruled that France's administrative justice system “does not have jurisdiction” to decide the compensation claim, agreeing with the position of the public prosecutor that the dispute should be heard by a court in Baghdad.

The family's lawyers have argued that the use of the building for French public-service missions brings the case under French administrative law.

“There must be a court with jurisdiction. Otherwise, what is already an injustice will become a denial of justice and therefore an absurdity,” they said.

“The French Republic is occupying a building that does not belong to it,” Mignard told the media.

The civil and administrative proceedings are continuing in parallel.

By Aghakazim Guliyev