Sponsored by a bipartisan quartet of senators, the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, now before the Senate Judiciary Committee, seeks to make it easier for those seeking restitution of stolen artwork to press their claims. Alice B. Lloyd explains the bill’s significance:
The HEAR Act [is] an effective reset on statutes of limitation restricting restitution for heirs. . . .
A grandmother in Ohio may remember a Flemish landscape hanging in her parents’ dining room in the interwar old country, and her grandchildren, heirs to that obliterated culture, can now take the search [for the stolen art] online. But even if a tech-savvy grandson can find a possible match on one of the public online archives—he’d judge by its dimensions, description, and, if luck would have it, by its photograph—the work of verifying her claim to even a minor Old Master would take expensive expert advising and legal counsel. Meanwhile, statutes of limitation and laches, legal restraints on the time a claimant waits to seek justice for a crime, differ from state to state; but nowhere in the U.S. do these restraints favor the victims of international crimes carried out a lifetime ago. . . . .
In a legal system unaccustomed to timeless ownership, granting families’ claims on their stolen treasures full credit under the law establishes claim to the world as it was before the Holocaust—a world in which a woman, looking upon a painting, would feel the same soul-stirring we do. And if the Holocaust was a failure of all humanity, the task of picking up what pieces remain is, as supporters of the HEAR Act see it, also the responsibility of us all.
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/hear-them-out/article/2002436?