Judge notes injured party was subject to repeated detention and torture
The Ontario Superior Court has ordered the Islamic Republic of Iran to pay a party injured by domestic terrorist activity $200 million in compensatory and punitive damages and two family members $150,000 in damages for loss of guidance, care, and companionship.
Iran – the defendant in Haftlang, et al. v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 2026 ONSC 3155 – admitted to recruiting Mr. Haftlang, then aged 13, as a child soldier for its war against Iraq, beginning in 1981.
Near the end of the conflict, Mr. Haftlang became a prisoner of war in an Iraqi military prison. Upon his repatriation in 1990, Iranian officials deemed him an “infidel” due to his criticism of the regime. They repeatedly imprisoned and tortured him.
After his release in 1993, Mr. Haftlang married and had a daughter with his wife. He started working as a mechanic on government-operated cargo ships.
During a 2001 trip from South Korea to Vancouver aboard the Iran Mazandran, Mr. Haftlang clashed ideologically with the captain and crew members and insulted the Supreme Leader. Afraid that the captain would report him to Iranian officials, he jumped overboard and swam to shore.
The plaintiffs – Mr. Haftlang and his wife, daughter, and son – became Canadian citizens and Vancouver residents. Mr. Haftlang continued to experience mental shock and physical reminders from his years of exploitation, incarceration, and torture.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice addressed whether it could hold Iran liable for terrorist activity as defined in the Criminal Code, 1985, under legislation lifting Iran’s state immunity.
According to the court, the injured party could pursue damages against Iran for terrorist activity by the combined operation of the federal State Immunity Act, 1985, and the federal Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act, 2012.
The court explained that the legislation lifted sovereign immunity only if the perpetrators of the violence aimed to coerce or intimidate Mr. Haftlang for a political, religious, or ideological purpose.
The court said Mr. Haftlang’s immediate family members could then pursue a derivative claim for compensation under s. 61 of Ontario’s Family Law Act, 1990 (FLA).
“Although Mr. Haftlang’s circumstances were unlikely to have been unique, this appears to be the first instance where a Canadian court has considered whether ‘terrorist activity,’ as required to pierce Iran’s sovereign immunity in Canadian law, includes certain atrocities committed by the Iranian state against its own nationals on home soil,” wrote Judge R. Lee Akazaki for the court.
The court concluded that the Iranian agents’ imprisonment and torture of their own national without charge after his release from military prison constituted terrorist activity.
In reaching this conclusion, the court characterized the purpose, objective, or cause motivating the mistreatment – the Iranian officials’ characterization of Mr. Haftlang as an “infidel” and their attempt to stop him from complaining to others about his role in the war – as political.
The court noted that political also meant religious and ideological in the context of Iran’s revolutionary state actors.
“Although these activities were all internal within Iran’s revolutionary state apparatus, the objects and intentions were no different in principle from attacks on foreign soil to deter foreign opposition, among the diaspora or otherwise, to the Iranian state,” Akazaki said.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice awarded Mr. Haftlang $100 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages.
The court did not deem the amount of compensatory damages inflated, given that the victim injured by Iranian domestic terrorist activity endured years of detention and torture and continued to suffer from the physical impacts of torture and mental trauma.
Regarding punitive damages, reserved for exceptional cases, the court found an act of state terrorism axiomatically exceptional.
Citing Zarei v. Iran, 2021 ONSC 8569, the court awarded Mr. Haftlang punitive damages based on the reasoning that a single person’s cause for righting terrorist acts should ring as loudly as the cause of multiple individuals.
Under s. 61(2)(e) of the FLA, the court ordered the defendant to pay damages of $100,000 to Mr. Haftlang’s wife and $50,000 to his daughter.
“The high end of FLA awards may not provide much solace for their loss, but I am bound to award amounts following the range,” Akazaki wrote.
Based on the victim impact statements, the court considered the wife a victim of her husband’s psychological injuries.
Lastly, the court dismissed the son’s claim without costs. The court found the son, born after Mr. Haftlang’s arrival in Canada, ineligible for a cause of action under s. 61, which should have a basis on an existing family relation during the tort’s commission.
