Iran’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that new US sanctions against Tehran amount to more than an illegal economic war on a single country, describing them as a “declaration of war” against all governments.
Spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei, quoted by the semi‑official Fars news agency, argued the measures represent “an attempt by the United States to exert extraterritorial sovereignty over all independent UN member states.”
“No government has the right to force foreign banks, enterprises, or airports, each operating under the exclusive jurisdiction of their own sovereignty, to refrain from engaging in legitimate trade with a third country,” Baghaei said.
Al Jazeera reported that Baghaei insisted that “such secondary sanctions have no basis in international law” and violate the principle of sovereign equality enshrined in Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the UN Charter. Economic coercion, he added, constitutes “an international offence and a wrongful act.”
Baghaei warned that combining sanctions with a naval blockade “reduces the sovereignty of other states to something temporary and conditional upon the whims and caprices of another power.”
Yielding to such intimidation, he said, would erode national sovereignty and mark “a catastrophic return to blatant, full‑scale colonialism.”
