Opinion ID: 3173398
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Deliberately inflicting on the group

Text: conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part . . . Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention), art. 2, Dec. 9, 1948, 78 U.N.T.S. 277 (emphasis added). That definition is “generally accepted for purposes of customary [international] law.” Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States § 702 cmt. d. It appears not only in the Genocide Convention itself, but also in numerous other international treaties. See, e.g., Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court art. 6, July 17, 1998, 2187 U.N.T.S. 90; Statute of the International Tribunal for Rwanda art. 2 (1994); Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia art. 4 (1993). The offense of genocide under our domestic law uses the same definition. See 18 U.S.C. § 1091(a). For our purposes, the pivotal acts constituting genocide are those set out in subsection (c) of the definition. The complaint describes takings of property intended to “[d]eliberately inflict[] on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Genocide Convention art. 2(c). Indeed, the Genocide Convention’s history indicates that paragraph (c) aimed precisely to capture the practice of expropriation and ghettoization in the Holocaust. A delegate to the drafting committee specifically “referred to the destructive living conditions in the Jewish Ghettos within German[-]occupied territory during the Second World War as an example of the sort of conditions falling within the purview of (a draft version) of paragraph (c).” Christian J. Tams, Lars Berster & 25 Bjorn Schiffbauer, Convention on the Prevention of Genocide: A Commentary 122 (2014) (citing [U.N. Doc. E/AC 25/SR 414]); see also Int’l Criminal Court, Elements of Crimes, art. 6(c) n.4 (2011) (stating that genocide under paragraph (c) “may include, but is not necessarily restricted to . . . systematic expulsion from homes”). The Holocaust’s pattern of expropriation and ghettoization entailed more than just moving Hungarian Jews to inferior, concentrated living quarters, or seizing their property to finance Hungary’s war effort. Those sorts of actions would not alone amount to genocide because of the absence of an intent to destroy a people. The systematic, “wholesale plunder of Jewish property” at issue here, however, aimed to deprive Hungarian Jews of the resources needed to survive as a people. de Csepel, 714 F.3d at 594. Expropriations undertaken for the purpose of bringing about a protected group’s physical destruction qualify as genocide. The complaint describes the plaintiffs’ experiences in just those terms. As the complaint sets out, the Hungarian Holocaust proceeded in a series of steps and included the taking of property and ghettoization at various points in that process: “The Nazis . . . achieved [the Final Solution] by first isolating [Jews], then expropriating the Jews’ property, then ghettoizing them, then deporting them to the camps, and finally, murdering the Jews and in many instances cremating their bodies.” Compl. ¶ 91. The ghettoization effort included, as an integral component, the confiscation of the Jews’ personal property. Id. ¶ 3. “Hungarian officials stripped Jews . . . of their valuable possessions when they were transferred into the Jewish [ghettos],” id. ¶ 82, and, once in the ghettos, Jews were “stripped of protective clothing, exposed to the elements, [and] deprived of sanitary facilities,” id. ¶ 101. The plaintiffs’ individual experiences with 26 ghettoization exemplified that pattern. See id. ¶¶ 23, 29, 31, 42, 66, 73, 80. And the defendants confiscated any personal property remaining in the victims’ possession before transferring them via railroad to the Nazi death camps. See id. ¶¶ 12, 16, 19, 32, 39, 43, 54, 68, 74, 80. Because the plaintiffs thereby allege the requisite genocidal acts and intent, their jurisdictional allegations suffice as a legal matter to bring their property-based claims within the FSIA’s expropriation exception. See Phoenix Consulting Inc. v. Republic of Angola, 216 F.3d 36, 40 (D.C. Cir. 2000). If the defendants were to challenge the factual basis of those allegations on remand, the district court would need to go beyond the pleadings and resolve the factual dispute. See id. For present purposes, it is enough to note that the complaint describes takings of property that are themselves genocide within the legal definition of the term. Such expropriations constitute “tak[ings] in violation of international law.” 28 U.S.C. § 1605(a)(3).