The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether a group of Holocaust survivors and their heirs can take Hungary to an American court to answer for the confiscation of Jewish property during the mass extermination during World War II.
The dispute revolves around technical questions over Hungary’s immunity as a foreign sovereign and marks the second time the judges have begun the long legal battle.
The hearing is expected to be heard during the Supreme Court’s next annual term, with oral arguments likely to be held near the end of this year.
As Nazi Germany approached defeat in World War II, the Hungarian government in 1944 rushed to deport and kill more than half a million Jews, one of the largest and fastest mass exterminations during the Holocaust. Along the way, the government confiscated and liquidated valuable Jewish property.
In 2010, a group of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their heirs brought a class action lawsuit against Hungary and its national railway, seeking compensation for their stolen property.
For the next 14 years, the parties argued over whether American courts had jurisdiction to hear the case.
Federal law makes foreign nations generally immune from lawsuits in the United States, but survivors argue that their lawsuit falls under the law’s exception for property expropriation.
At issue before the Supreme Court is the exception’s requirement that the property have a “commercial nexus” with the United States. Survivors claim that Hungary mixed the proceeds of its stolen assets with other funds, and some of the proceeds are now present in the United States in connection with Hungary’s commercial activity.
While a lower court agreed that the case could move forward based on that theory, survivors agreed that the Supreme Court should revisit the ruling to resolve a split among the country’s appeals courts on the issue — underlining that living survivors now have at least least 90 years of age. .
“They deserve to know once and for all whether they will be able to seek in the courts of this nation recognition and justice for the crimes that petitioners have committed against them and against humanity,” their lawyers wrote in court filings.
Hungary has long warned of the reciprocal dangers of revoking foreign sovereign immunity, telling the Supreme Court that it “will serve as a beacon for plaintiffs around the world to litigate all types of historical complaints in national courts and unnecessarily involve the United States in disputes with which it has no legitimate connection.”
In 2021, the justices returned the Holocaust survivors’ case to a lower court after weighing another issue related to Hungary’s immunity.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
