Holocaust survivors and their descendants will likely accept an easier fourth dimension reclaiming fine art that the Nazis stole decades ago, cheers to a new law that President Barack Obama finalized late final week. The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act erodes some of the legal technicalities that fine art museums have used to concord on to Nazi-looted art when faced with claims.

"The HEAR Act will stop an enduring injustice for Holocaust victims and their families," said Ronald Lauder, chairman of both the Commission for Art Recovery and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, in a statement. "For besides long, governments, museums, auction houses and unscrupulous collectors immune this egregious theft of culture and heritage to continue, imposing legal barriers like capricious statutes of limitations to deny families prized possessions stolen from them past the Nazis." Lauder, a cosmetics company executive, helped support the human activity and testified on its behalf earlier Senate subcommittees in June.

Related: How a Nazi-looted painting made its style to University of Oklahoma

Since World War Ii, the U.S. government has led efforts to rails down an estimated 650,000 art objects stolen from Jews and other victims by the Nazis. Art restitution advocates say that some 100,000 objects remain missing. Even when survivors or descendants locate artwork and file claims, museums and other fine art institutions are sometimes unwilling to return them and use legal technicalities such as the statute of limitations to hold on to the art. Those practices become against guidelines that national governments and museum associations accept established in recent years for dealing with such claims.

In a recent case, Léone Meyer, who was orphaned in France during the Holocaust and later on adopted by the family that owned the Galeries Lafayette department stores, spent her adult life searching for Camille Pissarro's La Bergère Rentrant des Moutons. The Nazis had seized the French impressionist painting from her adoptive parents' banking company vault during the state of war. In 2012, her son discovered that the painting had made its style to the University of Oklahoma'due south art museum.

Meyer sued in order to reclaim the work, but the academy argued that the statute of limitations had passed. In February, subsequently years of negotiations, the parties announced they had settled. The painting will soon rotate every few years between the university and a French institution of Meyer's choosing.

The HEAR Human activity gives claimants half dozen years after discovering the whereabouts of stolen art to file a claim. Previously, lawyers for people or institutions in possession of the fine art accept said that the statute of limitations, which in some states expires after only a few years, began when the Nazis first stole the art decades agone.

"It actually sends a signal to the world about the U.S. regime's seriousness in undoing Nazi wrongs," says Raymond Dowd, a lawyer who has represented claimants in a scattering of Nazi-era restitution cases. Dowd says this could be the near important federal policy regarding Nazi-looted art since the stop of World War Two. The government had previously issued laws or policy statements on the issue, such equally the 1998 Holocaust Victims Redress Human action, simply "this is the first time that the U.S. has actually acted since World State of war Ii, taking concrete legislative activity, to aid Holocaust victims in recovering property."

Texas Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced the act. The U.S. Firm of Representatives and Senate both passed the bill earlier in December. "With the president's signature, we delivered a long-overdue victory for the families of Holocaust victims," Cruz said in a statement. "This bipartisan legislation rights a terrible injustice and sends a articulate point that America volition go on to root out every noxious vestige of the Nazi regime."

Read more from Newsweek.com:

- Helen Mirren joins Ted Cruz to push for return of art stolen by Nazis
- The concluding Nazi hunter
- Why are museums holding on to art looted by the Nazis?