Against formidable odds and a range of powerful opponents, including the White House, Holocaust survivors are finally starting to make progress in their fight to win the right to sue European insurance companies for benefits they have been denied for more than half a century.
Against formidable odds and a range of powerful opponents, including the White House, Holocaust survivors are finally starting to make progress in their fight to win the right to sue European insurance companies for benefits they have been denied for more than half a century.
The refusal to honor those obligations is bad enough, but the denial of the right to sue adds further injury. It violates a principle that every American considers a fundamental birthright — the ability to go to court to seek redress of a legitimate grievance.
This unusual provision was part of an agreement to create the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, which came into being in 1998 with the blessing of the Clinton administration. The agreement has been upheld by the courts, including the Supreme Court, and strongly defended by both the Bush and Obama administrations down to the present day.
But that doesn’t make it right. Holocaust survivors — an aging and diminishing population, many in their 80s and 90s — have not been treated fairly.
The idea was an overall, legally binding settlement would preclude further lawsuits against insurance companies and, once and forever, close the books on a scandalous breach of honor and business protocol that came to light at the end of World War II. By the time the commission closed shop in 2007, however, only a fraction of the looted funds was recovered by the individual owners or heirs.
The International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims paid out about $305 million, and an additional $200 million went to humanitarian programs for survivors. This is less than 3 percent of the amount owed to victims and their families — estimated today at $20 billion.
Five years ago, legislation was introduced in Congress to recover their legal rights, but it went nowhere. This month may have been a turning point, though. A bipartisan effort led by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, was unanimously approved by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, which she heads.
The Judiciary Committee is the next stop. Both efforts are sure to encounter harder and louder resistance from opponents as they go forward. The State Department has aggressively lobbied against the bill. It told the committee the legislation would “weaken our ability to achieve such settlements in the future.”
Let’s hope so. The bill should be passed by Congress and signed by the president, to redress a grievous harm and serve as a reminder that it’s wrong to deny legal rights to an entire class of citizens and should never be tolerated.