The Supreme Court announced Monday it will review a long-standing lawsuit from families of Holocaust victims seeking compensation from Hungary over property confiscated from them during World War II.

The nine justices will hear arguments this fall over a case that concerns whether federal courts in the United States are the proper forum for the lawsuit. Under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, sovereign nations such as Hungary maintain certain levels of immunity from lawsuits but are exempted from FSIA’s protections if property was “taken in violation of international law.”

A group of Hungarian Holocaust survivors, some of whom are over the age of 90 now, brought a class-action lawsuit against Hungary and its national railway in 2010. The railroad played a key role in the Holocaust, transporting more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland over a period of two months in 1944.

The justices will have to determine whether the survivors can justify the exception’s requirement that the property has a “commercial nexus” with the U.S. The claim under the class-action suit is that Hungary combined the proceeds of its stolen property with other funds and that some of the proceeds are now within the U.S. due to trade and other business with the overseas sovereign nation.

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There exists a split in lower courts over this topic. While a lower court agreed that this lawsuit could move forward under the commercial nexus theory, a separate case involving Holocaust victims was overruled in 2021 after the justices said the victims had not reached the bar to prove their claim.

Arguments in Hungary v. Rosalie will be heard likely before the end of the calendar year, with a decision expected before the end of June 2025.