Congress passes Holocaust art restitution bill ahead of 2026 deadline

Congress has unanimously passed legislation extending the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, preserving a key legal pathway for heirs seeking to recover artworks looted during the Nazi era ahead of the law’s planned expiration.

The 2016 HEAR Act allows heirs of Jewish collectors whose artworks were looted by the Nazis to file claims within six years of discovering the works. That provision was set to expire on December 31, 2026.

Leading art lawyer Frank Lord, who recently joined the international law firm Withers, said that sunset provision had been included in the 2016 law because lawmakers had wanted to give people time to make such claims and gather information but provide some balance so as not to “let it be extended forever.”

The new extension, which is expected to be signed into law by President Donald Trump, permanently removes the deadline for filing litigation, though claims must still be filed within six years of first discovering the missing artworks.

The debate and vote Monday took about 20 minutes, according to a review of footage from CSPAN, during which four lawmakers spoke. They were Rep. Laurel Lee (R-FL), Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

“Unfortunately, this limited time frame has allowed some institutions to delay or withhold information and run out the clock,” Rep. Jerry Nadler said during debate ahead of the vote. “I hope we can all agree, Mr. Speaker, that justice for victims of the holocaust and their families should not come with an expiration date.”

Lord said he was not aware of evidence that institutions had deliberately delayed claims.

“I don't know of any case. I haven't heard anyone say that publicly. I haven't heard anyone accuse a museum of specifically slow walking material,” he said.

“At the same time, it continues to be true that there's a lot of material in the United States that needs to be examined. And provenance research is long and hard work and sometimes you just can't find all the material that you want right away.”

Lawmakers who spoke Monday also sought to distinguish between determining cases on their merits instead of on procedural or technical matters. Lord said courts have seen Nazi-looted art cases dismissed for procedural reasons.

He pointed to a case he worked on as a member of the legal team for Marei von Saher in her dispute against the Norton Simon Museum, which sought the return of two Lucas Cranach the Elder paintings once owned by the Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose collection was sold under duress after he fled the Nazi invasion in 1940.

Von Saher ultimately did not prevail after years of litigation. U.S. courts applied Dutch law, treating postwar transfers of the paintings as legally valid and limiting the heirs’ ability to recover the works.

The bill that passed Monday seeks to curb those outcomes by allowing courts to hear cases against a foreign state without regard to the nationality or citizenship of the alleged victim, as long as the artwork has a commercial connection to the United States.

And it prevents certain defenses that can be used, including international comity—which is the deference to the laws of other countries—which came into play in the von Saher case.

“But what is most significant probably is laches,” Lord said, referring to a defense where a court can dismiss a claim if it finds the plaintiff waited too long to bring it, making the case unfair to litigate.

Lord said laches involves both delay and prejudice, meaning a court must find not only that a claim was brought late but that the delay harmed the defendant’s ability to defend it, such as through missing evidence or diminished records.

“If you look at these claims, what you see most often is lost evidence. What they say is, ‘We can't really figure out what happened, because documents are lost. People have died. Time has passed, and therefore it would not be just to give the property to the claimant,’” Lord said. “That defense has been, I would say, the most significant defense in these cases.”

Some lawmakers tried to have laches removed from the 2016 HEAR Act when it was passed, Lord said, but it ended up being “deliberately” left in, Lord said. He said the new provisions explicitly removing laches from play is “a big deal potentially for these claims.”

Courts now having to actually determine such cases on their merits is going to be an adjustment, Lord said.

“Things like laches, statutes of limitations, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, those are legal arguments. And those are arguments, therefore, that lawyers are really comfortable with, because that's what we do. We make legal arguments,” Lord said.

“Merits is history, and traditionally, neither judges nor lawyers are really trained as historians. That's a really interesting shift, because you're taking the problem, in a sense, out of the hands of lawyers who have been the experts on how to deal with these for so long.”

Instead, cases will now have to rely on expert testimony, documentation and other evidence that generally has not made it into such cases because they get dismissed before they can be introduced in court.

“A laches defense essentially says, ‘We don't have enough facts,’ right? We don't have enough evidence. But now, you're going to have to decide on the evidence that there is, and there's not more of it,” Lord said.

“There won't be more evidence than there was, just because you changed the law. It'll still be just as ambiguous, if ambiguity was a problem. You'll just have to make a decision.”

But not all cases rely on defenses like laches. Sometimes there is plenty of evidence to determine a case.

Lord pointed to the case of Dutch Jewish dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose gallery was looted by the Nazis, as an example of how some restitution claims are supported by extensive documentation.

He said the dealer kept a notebook listing his inventory, while photographs of the works and Nazi transport records—some tied to Hermann Göring—created a clear paper trail linking specific artworks to the looting.

“That's a lot of evidence. That's a lot of pretty unambiguous evidence,” he said. “Now most claims are not like that, but it's not fair to say that all claims are ambiguous.”

And in some cases, museums have sought to argue that they purchased or acquired artworks fairly without knowledge that they had been looted.

Lord said the question of whether a buyer acquired an artwork “without knowledge” of its history is complicated by changing standards over time.

He said collectors and museums in the decades after World War II often did not conduct the level of provenance research expected today, in part because records were incomplete and centralized databases of looted works still do not exist.

Lord said the law does not appear to override the doctrine of res judicata, meaning previously decided cases are unlikely to be reopened, and its effect on future litigation remains uncertain.

“If you go back to the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, what they were recommending was a just and fair solution,” he said. “This legislation says that if you can prove it, return it.”

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