Court Opinion

ID: 9493867
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:21:44.11499+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:56:04.668322
License: Public Domain

SILVERMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
In this case, foreign sovereign immunity has been invoked, not to protect a foreign instrumentality from United States courts, but from its oim courts. This lawsuit was brought to enforce a judgment already rendered against the Peruvian Central Bank, in Peru, by the courts of Peru. The application of foreign sovereign immunity in these circumstances is at cross purposes with international comity and respect for sovereign nations, the very principles underlying foreign sovereign immunity in the first place. Verlinden v. Central Bank of Nigeria, 461 U.S. 480, 486, 103 S.Ct. 1962, 76 L.Ed.2d 81 (1983).
We need not decide today how to resolve any tension between those principles and the language of the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act in cases involving nothing more than the domestication of an existing foreign judgment. As my colleagues in the majority point out, the Peruvian judgment that the plaintiffs seek to enforce was declared null and void by the Peruvian Supreme Court in 1998. It is for that reason that I would affirm the district court’s dismissal of the complaint to domesticate the judgment.