(decided February 21, 2025)
The federal Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act generally immunizes foreign countries, and their agents, from private lawsuits brought in the United States, except when the foreign country has illegally obtained property within the United States, or when its agent is using such property in its commercial activities within the United States. “Property” includes the proceeds of “property” under the statute. In this case, the Court unanimously ruled that the co-mingling of proceeds from the sale of illegally property with the proceeds from legally obtained property by a foreign country or one of its agents is not sufficient, in and of itself, to justify a lawsuit against the foreign country, or its agent.
Here, the World War II regime of Hungary murdered enormous numbers of Jewish-Hungarian citizens, and stole most, if not all of their valuable works-of-art in the process. One of the country’s agents also participated in the Holocaust in that manner. Hungary and its agent later sold the stolen art works, and co-mingled the proceeds of those sales into their general, but lawfully obtained treasuries. The Court unanimously held that that co-mingling of money was not sufficient for the loss of Hungary’s immunity from American lawsuits because the plaintiffs could not and did not allege any means for of directly tracing the proceeds of the stolen art [i.e., “that property”] sales into the defendants’ general treasuries as they are held today. The court said the plain language of Section 1605(a)(3), quoted above, rendered their allegation of historical “co-mingling” of funds, by itself, legally insufficient to justify their lawsuit.
Comment: The Court’s elevation of the law, as written, over what must be many people’s notions of abstract fairness, is both commendable, and necessary in a secular “republic.”
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