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Sender:
Lionel Smith
Date:
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 23:06:58 +0200
Re:
Alperin v Vatican Bank

 

In the US, an important case arising out of the Nazi occupation of Croatia and their installation of a puppet regime:

"The Complaint describes in detail the atrocities inflicted on the Holocaust Survivors during World War II by the Ustasha and, more generally, by allied Fascists “believed to be Croatians.” In addition to describing the looting of assets, the Complaint recites genocidal acts of the Ustasha, including those carried out at the “Jasenovac Concentration Camp complex, termed by historians as the ‘Auschwitz of the Balkans.’ ” Upon the collapse of the Ustasha regime in 1945, the Holocaust Survivors maintain that “all or a portion of the Ustasha Treasury was transferred to cooperative Roman Catholic clergyman [sic] and Franciscans for transport to Rome where Franciscans sympathetic to the Ustasha were based.” These funds eventually found their way into the hands of the Vatican Bank, among other recipients. As alleged in the Complaint, “A 1948 U.S. Army Intelligence reports [sic] confirmed 2,400 kilos of Ustasha stolen gold were moved from the Vatican to one of the Vatican’s secret Swiss bank accounts.” In the decades following World War II, the Holocaust Survivors contend that the Vatican Bank and the Croatian Liberation Movement continued to profit from transactions involving the Ustasha treasury."

The case is in the US 9th circuit and the 9th CCA has decided by a majority that some causes of action (conversion, unjust enrichment, restitution, accounting) should not be struck out on the basis of the "political question" doctrine", although this of course does not mean the claims will succeed. Meanwhile the dissenting judge says,

"What the majority has unintentionally accomplished in embracing this case is nothing less than the creation without legislation of a World Court, an international tribunal with breathtaking and limitless jurisdiction to entertain the World’s failures, no matter where they happen, when they happen, to whom they happen, the identity of the wrongdoer, and the sovereignty of one of the parties."

For the judgments, see

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0315208p.pdf

 

Lionel Smith


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