TEHRAN (Iran News) – British Civilized Piracy. Some countries in the current world try to act as good police or even well-wishers of other nations but they are actually behaving like the civilized gangsters or pirates and one of these counties is UK which claims it is a human right defender but it does not give a damn to human right issue when it comes to its it and its favor.

For years the Islamic Republic of Iran and Britain have been at loggerheads over the return of Iran’s money or delivery of the weapons that the UK was to sell to Tehran. The payment of a £400m debt that Britain owes to Iran over an unfulfilled military equipment contract dating back to 1970s.

In the mid-1970s the UK sold more than 1,500 Chieftain battle tanks and 250 repair vehicles to its close ally the Shah of Iran. Iran paid £600m for the tanks in advance, but the UK, through its arms sales export subsidiary International Military Services (IMS), in February 1979 refused to deliver the remaining weaponry when the shah was deposed and replaced by a new revolutionary and Islamic regime. Only 185 tanks had been delivered.

After years of private negotiations, in 1990 Iran made a claim for its money back for the undelivered weaponry by taking the UK to international arbitration in The Hague. The UK made a counterclaim in 1996, but in an arbitration in 2001 the UK lost both claims. Iran then sought to have the award enforced in the English courts, something Britain resisted until IMS in 2002 put £350m into the UK court as security. The UK, after getting the award’s size reduced once in The Hague finally seemed to have run out of options when its final appeal was dismissed in 2009.

Although several times the domestic and international courts have ruled UK to pay Iran’s debts, this country has evaded under the pretext of the U.S. and EU sanctions but it seems the country is inclined to pay back the money  and Iran’s money has been taken as hostage by the British like their ancestors who were pirates and used to loot people.

On Thursday, former British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt urged the government in London to expedite efforts to settle an outstanding debt to Iran, saying the issue is affecting the relations between the two countries.

Speaking to the BBC Radio, Hunt said that the payment of a £400m debt that Britain owes to Iran over an unfulfilled military equipment contract dating back to 1970s was not equivalent of a ransom as described by some anti-Iran figures in Britain.

Instead, Hunt said, that the failure to pay the long-overdue debt would damage relations between Iran and the UK.

“… this is not ransom money. This is a debt. An international court has said so. The defense secretary has said so. We should pay it because it is an irritant to relations,” said the Conservative member of the British parliament.

The comments come just before a planned meeting in London between UK Foreign Office officials and Iranian deputy foreign minister Ali Bagheri Kani as the two sides prepared to return to talks aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.

They also came on the 19th day of a hunger strike outside the Foreign Office by Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British journalist who has been sentenced to prison in Iran over involvement in anti-government activities.

Hunt said the UK government could use the opportunity of Bagheri’s visit to London to secure the release of Zaghari-Ratcliffe as part of broader discussions on bilateral issues between the two countries.

But despite the court ruling and request of officials and people, British government resists paying Iran’s debts and each time blames Iran for not observing international laws and the JCPOA deal while it itself is one of the major violators of the international laws.

British officials say, and have done for three years, that the equivalent sum could be paid to Iran in medicines, or that the Iranian foreign ministry could give an undertaking that the money would not be used on armaments. The UK post-Brexit, they add, is now in charge of its own sanctions policy.

The British should know this fact that historically Iranians have fought for their rights and they know it well how Iranians expelled the British troops from their land in the past and they will finally get back their money by using a language which suits the British like what the British have experienced in the past.

Iranians have never trusted the British and will never do it unless they pay Iran’s debts and show good will in the future to amend their negative picture which has been painted among the Iranians during the past centuries and especially during Pahlavi dynasty and they are better to put an end to their modern and civilized style of piracy of freezing the assets or imposing sanctions.