The Washington Principles, adopted by the United States and 43 other countries in 1998, guide nations on how to handle claims for Nazi-looted art and recommend that countries create alternative dispute resolution processes, separate from their courts, to settle cases.

Why?

Because experts say the courts sometimes rely too much on narrow procedural grounds, like statutes of limitation, in deciding cases and do not consider the broader moral framework of a claim by families that lost art in the Holocaust.

So six countries — Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria — created restitution panels that have become the tribunals in which many looted art claims are resolved. But the United States has yet to create one, even though it was a U.S. diplomat, Stuart Eizenstat, the secretary of state’s special adviser on the Holocaust, who led the effort to establish the principles and, for decades, has been their tireless advocate.

This disparity was recently noted in an Art Newspaper essay by Olaf S. Ossmann, a lawyer who often represents claimants. He argued that the creation of such a panel in the United States was long overdue.

“It seems almost unbelievable,” Ossmann argued, “when the U.S. State Department rightly makes exactly this demand to various European and non-European governments but does not take action in its own country after more than 25 years.”

Eizenstat said in an interview that there are a number of reasons a restitution tribunal has never been created in the United States. One factor, he said, is that American institutions, unlike European museums, are almost exclusively private organizations that are not supervised by the government, or primarily financed by it.