New legal front in the dispute surrounding the French embassy in Iraq. The descendants of the Jewish owners of the building have sued the French state in Paris and are demanding 21.5 million euros, a sum according to them corresponding to unpaid rent for more than fifty years and the moral damage suffered.

Published on: 09/03/2026 - 9:18 p.m.

The dispute surrounding the French embassy in Iraq takes a new turn before French justice. The descendants of the Jewish owners of the building, the Lawee and Khazzam families, sued the State in Paris and demanded 21.5 million euros. An assignment of which AFP became aware on Thursday September 3.

In this extraordinary case of "looted Jewish property", in the eyes of the plaintiffs, this sum covers unpaid rent for more than fifty years and moral damage, according to their lawyers, Jean-Pierre Mignard and Imrane Ghermi.

Owners of this Baghdad building with its ocher walls and neoclassical columns, brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, members of the Jewish community, emigrated to Canada at the end of the 1940s, in the midst of an exodus of Jews from Iraq in an Arab world in turmoil.

Also read: How the house of a Jewish family in Baghdad is “squatted” by the French embassy

But the residence remains part of their heritage despite their exile. The French ambassador to Iraq signed a first rental contract with the Lawee brothers in 1964, taking effect in 1965, for this 3,800 m2 building with its 1,150 m2 land, according to an argument from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of which AFP was aware.

However, the French state stopped paying them any rent from 1974 and paid the corresponding amounts directly to the Iraqi authorities.

“A unilateral measure of an anti-Semitic nature”

If the French administration thus concluded rental contracts with the Iraqi authorities, it is because the historic owners were deprived of their real estate funds by Iraqi legislation concerning Jews who left Iraq, defended the French ministry.

“This spoliation of Jewish property was carried out with the complicity of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, France is responsible,” accuse Messrs Mignard and Ghermi.

They thus underline in their summons before the Paris judicial court that their clients were "dispossessed" by "a unilateral measure of an anti-Semitic nature taken by the Iraqi authorities to which the French State submitted without opposing it in any way".

“The French Republic is squatting”

The descendants of the building's owners, the Lawee and Khazzam families, have also already filed a petition with the Paris administrative court of appeal. “The two procedures are therefore taking their course in parallel,” commented their advice to AFP.

At the beginning of February, the Paris administrative court, seized of this request for compensation, considered that the French administrative court was "incompetent" to decide. The court thus followed the public rapporteur, who took up the arguments of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, assessing that this dispute falls under the jurisdiction of a court in Baghdad.

“The execution of public service missions” in this building chosen by France “results in the application of French administrative law to it”, Mess Mignard and Ghermi argued at the time. “There must be a competent court. Otherwise, what is already an injustice will border on a denial of justice, and therefore absurd,” these lawyers also argued in the perspective of a summons from the State, now effective.

“The French Republic is squatting in a building that is not its own,” Mignard repeated to the press.

With AFP

The content you are trying to access does not exist or is no longer available.