— An authority on Jewish religious law asserted today, against a background of continuing debate on whether the Reagan Administration should honor the agreement made with Iran by the outgoing Carter Administration to free the hostages, that “it is a general rule of law, especially Jewish law, that agreements made under duress are not binding.”
Rabbi Seymour Siege!, Professor of Ethics and Theology at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, gave that response on whether the United States government was “morally obliged to fulfill this agreement.” The Reagan Administration has indicated it would honor the agreement but not until it had completely reviewed the pact.
Siegel, until recently chairman of the Committee on Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, the association of Conservative rabbis, said the duress exemption rule was based “on the notion that contracts are enforceable only when the parties are acting freely.”
However, he said, in the American-Iranian accord “the case is complicated since part of the funds being transfered unquestionably belongs to the Persian government.” He said that, accordingly, “it would be right to return to the hostages’ captors the money that legitimately belongs to them.”
But he qualified this by saying he felt that the Reagan Administration should withhold part of the funds to compensate the hostages “for their legitimate grievance against those who injured them both physically and morally.”
Siegel also stressed that an important factor was that “we are not dealing with agreements made between individuals but between governments.” He declared it would be “dishonorable for sovereign states not to honor their promises.”
“Jewish tradition sees the value to society and to individuals of preserving the dignity and power to individuals of preserving the dignity and power of political authorities,” he declared, “governments should honor agreements even when their counterparts are not of the highest moral standards.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
