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The Claims Settlement Declaration provided in Article one for efforts to settle claims covered by Article two during a six-month period, following which claims could be submitted to the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal. The resulting deadline was January 19, 1982. Despite the publicity given to that deadline, a number of claims were received by the Tribunal after January 19, 1982. The Tribunal’s Registrar refused to file those claims. Some claims which had been timely filed were also refused by the Registrar for various failures to comply with other requirements of the Declaration or the Tribunal Rules. All those whose claims were refused were notified by the Registrar that the refusals could be appealed to the Tribunal, and many appeals were filed. Each appeal resulted in a Decision by the Tribunal with respect to the correctness of the refusal. While a few refusals were reversed on appeal, most were upheld.

The Algiers Declarations make no direct reference to interim measures that the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal might order, but Article 3, Paragraph 2 of the Claims Settlement Declaration makes an indirect reference by providing that the Tribunal ‘shall conduct its business in accordance with the arbitration rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) except to the extent modified by the parties or by the Tribunal to ensure that this agreement can be carried out’. The relevant provision of the UNCITRAL Rules – which is unchanged in the Tribunal Rules – is Article 26. When the Tribunal first addressed a request for interim measures of protection, it based the measures it ordered, not on Article 26, but on its ‘inherent powers’. The Tribunal did not refer to Article 26 in requesting Iran to stay proceedings against E-Systems in an Iranian court that involved the same contract and many of the same issues as E-System’s claims before the Tribunal.

Article 5 of the Claims Settlement Declaration provided the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal with broad discretion in its choices of applicable law. Consequently, it is impossible to define any coherent set of choice of law rules followed by the Tribunal, but there are a few general conclusions that appear to flow from the Tribunal’s practice. Firstly, it is clear that the Tribunal relished the freedom given it by Article 5. Secondly, many of the largest claims before the Tribunal were claims for compensation for properties expropriated by Iran. Thirdly, the references in Article 5 of the Claims Settlement Declaration were used frequently by the Tribunal to justify resort to ‘general principles of law’. Fourthly, whenever the Tribunal could find relevant rules of public international law, it tended to turn to them. Finally, the Tribunal consistently refused to consider itself bound by any national rules of evidence.

The Claims Settlement Declaration makes no reference either to the ‘standing’ of claimants to present and pursue their claims or to the ‘admissibility’ or ‘non-admissibility’ of claims. Nevertheless, the concepts of standing and admissibility were reflected in a few Awards. In general, the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal ruled that a claimant – or counterclaimant – lacked the standing to present or recover on a claim only when the evidence indicated that the claimant did not ‘own’ the claim, in the sense that any proceeds of the claim rightfully belonged to someone else. With respect to admissibility, the Tribunal’s very few holdings indicate that it considered claims based on penal, tax, or social security laws non-admissible, as well as claims too vague to state a cognizable claim or cause of action.

The first Award that decided a claim of unjust enrichment was Benjamin R. Isaiah v. Bank Mellat. In that case, the claimant established that he was the beneficial owner of funds used to purchase a bank check drawn in January 1979 by the respondent bank’s predecessor, which check was subsequently dishonored for insufficient funds. As the check was payable to one of the claimant’s associates, who was an Israeli, the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal had no jurisdiction over a claim based on the check, as such a claim would not satisfy the requirement of the Claims Settlement Declaration that a claim must be owned continuously by nationals of the same State from the date it arose until the date the Declaration entered into force. The concept of unjust enrichment had its origins in Roman law, where it emerged as an equitable device ‘to cover those cases in which a general action for damages was not available’.

The Algiers Declarations make no reference to rules of evidence, except as may be implicit in the general directive of Article 5 of the Claims Settlement Declaration that the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal ‘shall decide all cases on the basis of respect for law’. The Tribunal Rules, however, deal with the question of evidence in Article 24. While any party could request an opposing party to produce relevant, identified evidence, and the Tribunal could order such production, there was no means of enforcement available except for the Tribunal to draw adverse inferences from a failure to produce evidence that was evidently in the possession of that party. For all of these reasons, the Tribunal was inclined to accept as adequate proof of claims and defenses evidence that fell far short of what one might normally consider the best evidence, particularly when the Tribunal was satisfied that it was the best evidence available to the party.