Source: http://www.thealiadviser.org/us-foreign-relations-law/courts-cite-foreign-relations-4th/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 09:52:46+00:00

Document:
Two courts recently cited the Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, the official text of which is now available. Summaries of those opinions are provided below.
In Philipp v. Federal Republic of Germany, 894 F.3d 406 (D.C. Cir. 2018), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit cited Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States – Sovereign Immunity § 455 (Tentative Draft No. 2, 2016).
In that case, heirs of several Jewish art dealers who were based in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s brought an action against the Federal Republic of Germany and the agency that administered the museum where a valuable art collection was being exhibited, seeking to recover the art collection and/ or $250 million. The plaintiffs alleged that the collection was taken by the Nazis through the art dealers’ sale of the collection to the Nazi-controlled State of Prussia for barely 35 percent of its actual value. A German commission that had been created to resolve Nazi-era art claims had previously concluded ‘“that the sale of the [collection] was not a compulsory sale due to persecution’ and [that] it therefore could ‘not recommend the return of the [collection] to the heirs.’” The district court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss, in which they claimed that they were immune from suit under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA), that international comity required the court to decline jurisdiction until the plaintiffs exhausted their remedies in German courts, and that the plaintiffs’ state-law causes of action were preempted by U.S. foreign policy. The Court of Appeals affirmed in part and remanded, holding, inter alia, that the plaintiffs had no obligation to exhaust their remedies in Germany.
In R (on the Application of The Freedom and Justice Party) v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs,  EWCA Civ 1719 (Eng. & Wales), the Court of Appeal cited the Restatement of the Law Fourth, The Foreign Relations Law of the United States, in deciding whether, under customary international law, the receiving state had to grant, for the duration of a special mission’s visit, the privileges of personal inviolability and immunity from criminal proceedings in the same way that members of permanent missions were entitled to such immunities under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, 1961, and whether such immunities were recognized by the common law.
Dismissing the appeal, the Court of Appeal noted that the Divisional Court had examined the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in United States v. Sissoko, 995 F. Supp. 1469 (S.D. Fla. 1997), in which the court cited Restatement Third, Foreign Relations Law § 464 in rejecting a claim for immunity by a member of a special mission that had not been accredited as such, and observing that the United Nations Convention on Special Missions, 1969—which provides that special missions should automatically have not only the core immunities but also other immunities extending beyond the immunities that the particular special mission might need for its visit—was not customary international law.

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