A court in Paris has denied a Jewish family from Baghdad compensation for their former home, which was stolen from them and now houses the French embassy in Iraq.
In its ruling on Monday, the Administrative Tribunal of Paris said that it lacked jurisdiction to rule on the family’s claim and referred the matter to Iraqi authorities, should the family wish to further pursue it, AFP reported.
The claimants are descendants of two Jewish Iraqi brothers. Last year, they filed a claim for $22 million in back rent and an additional $11 million in damages from the French government.
The court adopted the position of the state verbatim, the lawyers representing the claimants, Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi, told AFP in a statement. The court “considers itself incompetent: In other words, it is referring us to the Shi’ite court in Baghdad,” the lawyers said. “We think this is surreal. We will discuss further action with our clients,” they said, adding, “We will not let this stand.”
One of the claimants, Philip Khazzam, the grandson of Ezra Lawee, told The Globe and Mail last year that, at the urging of Saddam Hussein’s government, the French government ceased paying rent to the Lawee family and appears to have redirected the money to the Iraqi treasury.
In the 1950s, the Iraqi government nationalized Jewish property and stripped Jews of their citizenship. This led to a mass exodus of the Jewish community, with many immigrating to Israel.
Iraq’s nationalization and confiscation of Jewish property picked up pace significantly after the Ba’ath Party’s rise to power in 1968, with Saddam, then the country’s vice president, later becoming president in 1979.
Ezra and his brother Khedouri Lawee were wealthy, as General Motors’ concessionaire for a region of the Middle East. They vacated their home in 1951 under duress, relocating to Montreal. They managed to hold on to the title of their Baghdad home and had a caretaker look after it.
The brothers say that France started leasing the house as its embassy in 1964 and had continued to pay rent to the Lawee family through 1974, even after the Ba’ath takeover. Paris also paid rent to the Iraqi treasury at the same time.
The French stopped the double payments in 1974, Ezra Lawee told The Globe and Mail. The French would only explain that the Iraqis had sequestered the building, he said.
“You have France sitting in a house for 55 years, not paying rent to the family that owns it,” Khazzam told The Globe and Mail. “This is a world leader in human rights, and this is what they do?”
France’s Foreign Ministry has refused to comment on the matter, citing ongoing judicial matters.
“France has occupied a stolen Jewish property for 50 years in full knowledge of the fact and without ever having undertaken any moral or economic redress,” Mignard wrote to France’s foreign minister in 2024. “This seems to me a scandal that we would do well to put an end to.”
