In a story that gets more unusual with every new development, the Russian Foreign Ministry has reportedly recommended filing a lawsuit, in Russia, against the United States Library of Congress in response to last month’s contempt sanctions order by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia arising out of Russia’s refusal to obey a judgment to return the Chabad Lubavitch library of Menachem Schneerson.
The Russian Foreign Ministry was quickly and harshly vocal in response to the January sanctions order, promptly issuing on Twitter, of all places, a series of veiled and explicit threats. Russia has already refused to loan cultural artifacts to the United States for more than two years because of the 2010 Chabad judgment.
The latest threat claims that the Library of Congress facilitated a 1994 interlibrary loan to Chabad of some books that were never returned to Russia. According to the Art Newspaper, the Kremlin-funded English-language news channel Russia Today reported that “The Russian State Library’s actions are expected to be symmetrical to the actions of the American side. They are expected to file a lawsuit with a Moscow court. If it finds the Library of Congress guilty of purloining the books and the financial claim is not settled, that will be a basis for Russia to demand the seizure of the non-immune American property abroad.” In addition, Sergey Lavrov has said, “We will seek to make a reciprocal move. This [situation] should not be left without reaction.”
Even accepting what is alleged about the 1994 loan as true, one has absolutely nothing to do with other. In any principled forum, threatening a blatantly pretextual lawsuit in retaliation for a valid judgment elsewhere should not survive dismissal—or sanctions. Moreover, if there were a legitimate grievance, one would expect it to have been raised sometime in the 18 years since the 1994 loan.
These threats instead underscore the fundamental misunderstanding at issue here that seems to be driving so many of the Russian responses: the apparently sincere belief by Russian officials that the D.C. court that issued the sanctions is somehow acting at the whim of the executive branch. There seems to be no convincing Russia otherwise, even though the Department of Justice publicly voiced its disagreement with the court’s approach. Hatching a scheme to hold the United States in contempt of a Russian court—to punish the United States for the acts of an independent court makes—as little sense as refusing to loan objects that cannot be seized because of the Immunity from Seizure Act, 22 U.S.C. § 2459, but that approach shows no sign of dissipating, either.
One might expect the United States actually to participate in Russia in defense of the Library of Congress (in contrast to Russia’s approach here), but given the attendant circumstances it is very difficult to gauge the likely course of the proceedings beyond that.