Members of the Supreme Court will hear the arguments of the parties on the initiative of the Hungarian state, through which they want to invalidate the plaintiffs’ lawsuit. In this case, the highest legal forum in the United States is called upon to decide whether the US court has the right to decide the legal dispute.
In 2010, the 14 people who survived the Emergency filed a compensation claim in a US court against the Hungarian state and the Hungarian Railways for property confiscated from them and their families in 1941.
The United States Supreme Court previously considered the case in 2020, and in its decision in 2021, it referred it again to the Washington Court of Appeals, which later refused to overturn the court’s action for the third time.
In the past 14 years, the legal dispute has visited many US court forums, some court decisions dropped the case due to lack of US legal jurisdiction, and legal representatives of the Hungarian state appealed against some court decisions. Thus the lengthy case came before the United States Supreme Court for the second time.
In 2021, at the same time as the decision on the lawsuit against the Hungarian state, the Supreme Court sided with the German state in a similar lawsuit. This lawsuit included the Guelph Treasure, a collection of church relics worth hundreds of millions of dollars, for which the heirs of the Jewish merchants filed a claim in 2015.
According to US laws, sovereign states, such as Hungary, cannot be held liable in a US court. At the same time, the relevant federal legislation (Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act) also provides an exception that applies to lawsuits in which property has been confiscated in violation of international law.
In the legal dispute between the Hungarian state, the Hungarian State Railways and Holocaust survivors, the Supreme Court must decide whether the exception applies to the relevant case. In accordance with the previously stated position of the Hungarian State, the Hungarian courts must dispose of lawsuits relating to Hungary, its individual organs and former Hungarian citizens.
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