Court blow for French Holocaust Jews
- From: "Heinrich" <Heinrich@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:56:18 +0200
A court has struck down a ruling that French railways must compensate the family of a Jewish man transported to an internment camp in Nazi-occupied France, dealing a blow to hundreds more claims.
Judges in an administrative appeals court in south-western Bordeaux said administrative courts were not competent to rule on the legal liability of state rail operator SNCF.
The ruling means plaintiffs will have to bring their cases before civil or criminal courts, where lawyers say they have far less chance of success.
"It's a way for the administrative justice system to kick the issue into touch," Gerard Boulanger, a lawyer representing some of those bringing cases against SNCF, told reporters.
SNCF did not immediately comment on the ruling.
Tuesday's decision overturned a landmark verdict last June in which a court ordered SNCF and the French government to pay $113,000 to the family of Georges Lipietz, a Polish-born Jew arrested by French police and taken by train to a transit camp near Paris in 1944.
Aged 21, Lipietz was arrested with his 15-year-old half-brother and taken in a cattle wagon to Drancy outside Paris, where they spent three months before the Allied victory spared them Auschwitz or another death camp.
Lipietz died after launching the action in 2001, but family members including his son Alain, a member of the European parliament, have continued the case.
Some 76,000 Jews were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in appalling conditions in railway boxcars to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.
The SNCF, which has received 1,800 requests for compensation since the ruling, said it had been forced to obey the orders of the government of the time and the German occupiers.
Some historians and Jewish groups said lawsuits were misguided and opportunist, and there have been suggestions the families and lawyers were motivated by financial considerations.
But lawyers for the families say SNCF acted out of greed, not coercion, pointing to evidence that it charged French authorities the price of a third-class rail ticket for each person loaded into its cattle wagons.
The ruling does not slam the door shut to further legal action against the state rail operator, but lawyers said it left plaintiffs with little hope of prevailing.
The Bordeaux court ruled SNCF had been requisitioned by the collaborationist Vichy government and had not acted on its own authority.
That would appear to leave little room for civil action against SNCF while any criminal lawsuit must target specific individuals, something which could prove extremely difficult 60 years after the events, lawyers noted.
President Jacques Chirac officially acknowledged French complicity in the wartime deportation of Jews for the first time in 1995. But it took a ruling in 2001 to make it possible to sue the French authorities for compensation
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