Document Type

Article

Disciplines

International Law

Abstract

On July 1, 1994, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected Mr. Hugo Princz's claim that Germany had implicitly waived its sovereign immunity by violating the jus cogen norm against genocide during World War H1. 1 The court held that violations of jus cogen norms do not constitute an implied waiver of immunity. Since then, there have been a number of other federal court cases that have reaffirmed the Princz 2 decision. Though there have been a number of articles published discussing the benefits and detriments of allowing jus cogen violations to constitute a waiver of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act ("FSIA"), this writer proposes that the issue needs to be revisited.

This writer believes that the Princz case best illustrates why the federal courts need to hold that violating jus cogen norms constitutes an implied waiver of foreign sovereign immunity. One of the main reasons the federal courts have refused to allow jus cogen violations to constitute an implied waiver of sovereign immunity is due to what they perceive to be Congress's explicit instruction to the contrary.3 However, in the Princz case, the legislative and executive branches both demonstrated their beliefs that Mr. Princz should have been compensated for the injuries he suffered by Germany's violations of jus cogen norms during World War II. For example, the State Department declared that "Mr. Princz's claim for compensation [from Germany] was 'legitimate and compelling."'

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