Ватикан банкіне қарсы Холокост құрбандарының ісі

Class action lawsuit filed in 1997 in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Alperin v. Vatican Bank was an unsuccessful class action suit by Holocaust survivors brought against the Vatican Bank ("Institute for the Works of Religion" or "IOR") and the Franciscan Order ("Order of Friars Minor") filed in San Francisco, California, on November 15, 1999. The case was initially dismissed as a political question by the District Court for the Northern District of California in 2003, but was reinstated in part by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2005. That ruling attracted attention as a precedent at the intersection of the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA). Part of the complaint against the IOR was dismissed in 2007 on the basis of sovereign immunity, and the remainder of the claim against that defendant was dismissed on the ground that the property claim had no nexus to the United States, a decision confirmed in February 2010 by the Ninth Circuit. The case against the Franciscan Order, who by then were the sole defendants, ended in March 2011 when the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment dismissing the claim, and the case was not appealed further. No part of the claim, therefore, ever came to trial and none of the plaintiffs' allegations of fact were ever established in Court.

The factual background as alleged in the claim was that Ustaše hiding in the Pontifical Croatian College of St. Jerome (the Croatian Seminary near the Vatican) brought a large amount of looted gold with them and that it was later moved to other Vatican extraterritorial property and/or the Vatican Bank. According to Phayer, "top Vatican personnel would have known the whereabouts of the gold", but he gives no evidence that they did, nor does he name any.

The class action was brought on behalf of "all Serbs, Jews, and former Soviet Union citizens (and their heirs and beneficiaries), who suffered" at the hands of the Ustaše. The named plaintiffs claimed to be victims of personal or property crimes committed by the Ustaše. Four organizations that represent holocaust survivors or human rights issues were named as plaintiffs. Since the case was dismissed at a preliminary stage, these claims were never proved. A principal piece of evidence against the Vatican was to have been the "Bigelow dispatch", an October 16, 1946 dispatch from Emerson Bigelow in Rome to Harold Glasser, the director of monetary research for the U. S. Treasury Department. The plaintiffs sought an accounting and restitution of the Ustaše Treasury that, according to the US State Department, had allegedly been transferred illicitly to the Vatican, the Franciscan Order and other banks after the end of the war, in order to further the goals of the Ustaše regime in exile and fund the Vatican ratline. The principal movers were allegedly Fr. Krunoslav Draganovic, Fr. Dominik Mandic OFM, and the war criminal Ante Pavelić.

The Second Ninth Circuit Appeal on the issue of sovereign immunity of the Vatican Bank was heard on December 10, 2009, in San Francisco. The case was dismissed on December 28, 2009. Plaintiffs have indicated they may appeal further.

On June 15, 2006, Judge Elizabeth Laporte of the Northern District of California denied without prejudice the plaintiff's motion for jurisdictional discovery and granted in part the plaintiffs motion to provide materials pursuant to Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. On December 27, 2007, Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted the Vatican Bank's motion to dismiss the fourth amended complaint; this effectively ended the case against the Vatican Bank on the basis of sovereign immunity. On April 14, 2009, Judge Chesney granted a plaintiff's motion for leave to file a sixth amended complaint no later than May 1, 2009. The sixth amended complaint was filed, naming the Franciscan Order as a defendant, and removing the Vatican Bank. On September 11, 2009, the District court dismissed the case against the Franciscans without prejudice on grounds of lack of federal jurisdiction and denied Plaintiffs' motion to amend the complaint on November 13, 2009. Plaintiffs appealed this to the Ninth Circuit on grounds that the Vatican Bank engages in commercial activity in the United States but lost this appeal.

On July 1, 2010, the Plaintiffs submitted a request that the European Central Bank initiate an investigation of Vatican Bank money laundering and dealing in Nazi gold. They based this on Article 8 of The Monetary Agreement between the European Union and The Vatican City State which forbids Euro issuing entities from money laundering.

The initial dismissal of the case on the political question doctrine was an extension of the precedent in Baker v. Carr. According to Prof. Gwynne Skinner, "most of the claims arising out of the Holocaust have been dismissed based on this doctrine either because decisions were already made regarding reparations, or because the Allied forces had already made decisions about who would be prosecuted for the various crimes committed during the Holocaust". According to Prof. Hannibal Travis: "Initially, U. S. courts dismissed claims by Holocaust survivors on the grounds that international law only gave rise to claims between states and was not self executing in the absence of implementing legislation in Congress. This erroneous interpretation of §1350 was corrected within a few years, and since 1980, the U. S. federal courts have exercised universal jurisdiction in a nearly unbroken line of cases involving offenses properly alleged to have been committed elsewhere in violation of international law." The case has been compared to several other 2003 lawsuits against private actors for wrongs committed during World War II, such as Anderman v. Federal Republic of Austria (also determined to be a political question). It has been cited as an example of an Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) case where the courts did not require the exhaustion of foreign legal remedies. The Ninth Circuit decision has been criticized by Golden Gate University Law Review on the grounds that: "while the court's demarcation between property claims and war objectives claims may be a sound analytical method for addressing political question doctrine issues, the slave labor claims should not have been excluded from the scope of the property claims". The plaintiffs attempted to coordinate with pending Catholic sex abuse cases to "avoid divergent findings on the issue of Vatican amenability to suit in the United States." The precedent from the 2005 appellate court ruling has already been applied in Mujica v. Occidental Petroleum Corporation.