Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi challenged Washington’s legal justification for the Feb. 28 strikes on Iran, drawing attention to the U.N. Charter’s limits on U.S. force.
In an opinion article carried by Kyodo News on Nov. 13, Araghchi said U.S. and Israeli attacks infringed Iran’s sovereignty and violated the charter. He argued that a forecast of future danger alone does not meet the grounds for invoking self-defense under Article 51, and said the U.S. strikes lacked U.N. Security Council authorization. Araghchi asked, “what would be left of the international legal order?” In earlier comments on the U.S.-Israeli war and Hormuz insecurity, he blamed the conflict and an economic blockade for insecurity around the waterway.
Article 2(4) protects the territorial integrity and political independence of any state from threats or force. Article 51 recognizes an inherent right to individual or collective self-defense in response to an armed attack. Araghchi also invoked the International Court of Justice’s 1986 Nicaragua v. United States case as historical support for the rule against force, not as a decision on the current strikes.
In a March 2 letter to Congress, President Donald Trump described the Feb. 28 operation’s aims as protecting U.S. forces and the U.S. homeland, supporting maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and defending regional allies, including Israel. State Department Legal Adviser Reed D. Rubinstein said on April 21 that the operation was part of an ongoing armed conflict and rested on U.S. self-defense and collective self-defense of Israel.
In a March 6 statement, Michael P. Scharf, whom the American Branch of the International Law Association identified as its president, called the U.S. intervention unlawful and said speculative future threats could not justify it. The U.N. secretary-general condemned the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Feb. 28 and called for hostilities to cease. The public statements set out opposing legal views, without a court ruling on the 2026 operation.
