A new method is proposed for designing complex all-pass IIR filters, the all-pass IIR filters with complex coefficients, in this paper. By minimizing the integration of certain square phase error over interested frequencies, an eigenvector of an appropriate real, symmetric and positive-definite matrix is computed to get the filter coefficients. The stability is achieved by specifying properly the desired phase specifications. If an appropriate iterative process is used, equiripple complex all-pass filter design can be obtained. The method is simple and the performance is comparable to the existing methods. Several examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.