A little known news...
http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1113827719517
Just in time for the picking of a new pope, the 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals decided Monday that Holocaust survivors can pursue
the Vatican Bank for profiting from a Nazi puppet
regime.
The decision in Alperin v. Vatican Bank, 05 C.D.O.S. 3216, revives
a class action that had been dismissed by San Francisco U.S.
District Judge Maxine Chesney.
Groups of Ukrainian, Russian and Belarusian Holocaust victims --
potentially hundreds of thousands, according to plaintiffs
attorneys -- had sued the Vatican Bank, the Franciscan Order, the
Croatian Liberation Movement and various banks in 1999.
Plaintiffs allege the defendants "profited from the genocidal acts
of the Croatian Ustasha political regime," which was installed by
the Nazis during World War II, according to the opinion.
The Ustasha regime operated death camps where as many as 700,000
Serbs died. After the Croatian government collapsed at the end of
the war, its leaders fled to Italy and some assets went into
Vatican control, according to a State Department report. Plaintiffs
allege that the Vatican Bank, an arm of the sovereign Vatican
government, essentially laundered the money, said plaintiffs lawyer
Thomas Easton of Eugene, Ore.
Easton said he believed it was "just a coincidence" that the
decision came on the first day cardinals deliberated who will be
the next pope.
However, Easton hopes the Catholic church takes advantage of the
timing and agrees to settle the case.
"I would think a new pope might want to clean the decks of this
kind of stuff," Easton said. "I'm thinking we have a good chance to
settle now."
The claims could exceed $100 million, according to a press release
put out by Easton's partner in the case, Jonathan Levy of Ohio.
Pepperdine University School of Law Professor Kathryn Lee Boyd
argued the plaintiffs case at the 9th Circuit.
Chesney had granted a motion to dismiss because she believed the
case wasn't justiciable under the political question doctrine. That
legal test requires courts to stay out of business normally
conducted by the executive and legislative branches.
Monday's divided 9th Circuit panel said Chesney was right, but only
regarding the so-called "war objective" claims. Two of the three
panel judges -- 9th Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown and Senior
Illinois District Judge Milton Shadur, sitting by designation --
said they would allow the more "garden variety" tort of conversion
claims.
"In the landscape before us, this lawsuit is the only game in town
with respect to claimed looting and profiteering by the Vatican
Bank," McKeown wrote for the majority. "No ongoing government
negotiations, agreements or settlements are on the horizon. The
outside chance that the executive branch will issue a statement in
the future that has the 'potentiality of embarrassment' when viewed
against our decision today does not justify foreclosing the
Holocaust survivors' claims."
But the third panelist, 9th Circuit Judge Stephen Trott, said
that's not good enough.
"With all respect to my valued colleagues, I see it as a mistake to
measure this issue of justifiability by a 'this lawsuit is the only
game in town' standard," Trott write in dissent. "This is not our
'game,' period, and we do not become vested with jurisdiction by
default of the other branches."
The defendants have not yet decided whether to appeal, said Paul
Vallone of San Francisco's Hinshaw & Culbertson, who represents
the Franciscan Order.
Although Monday's decision was a setback for his client, Vallone
pointed to sections of the opinion that tell the plaintiffs they
are by no means home free.
"There are several other obstacles that plaintiffs need to get
through," Vallone said.
Indeed, several times the judges noted the complexity and
difficulty of the massive case, calling it a "behemoth" and
comparing the district court's work on it to Sisyphus, the
mythological figure who rolled a boulder up a hill only to have it
roll back down for eternity.
Easton, on the other hand, found those comments encouraging. "Those
are signals to both sides to settle the case," he said.
The lawyer for the Vatican Bank, Jeffrey Lena of Berkeley, Calif.,
could not be reached for comment.
