29 August 2006
Some 200 families whose relatives were deported by France's pro-Nazi Vichy regime during World War II are to sue the state-owned French railway company SNCF for millions of euros in damages, a lawyer said on Monday. The case follows a landmark ruling in June, in which the French state and the rail firm were fined US$ 80,000 for their role in the wartime deportation of two Jewish men. The SNCF has appealed the ruling. The families, who include French, Israeli, Belgian, Canadian and American nationals, will launch their legal action in September, according to their lawyer Mathieu Delmas. They intend to demand "compensation for the prejudice suffered as a result of deportation – in livestock wagons, in inhuman conditions, knowing full well that people risked being murdered," he said. Initially they plan to ask the SNCF for an overall settlement "in the region of" several million euros, giving it two months to reply before taking the matter before an administrative court, Delmas explained. In June, a French administrative court upheld a lawsuit brought by the family of Green party deputy Alain Lipietz, whose father and uncle were taken by train to an internment camp in Paris in May 1944. Both survived the war. Previous, similar cases had been dismissed on the grounds that the SNCF was commandeered by the occupying German army, while the Vichy government was an aberration for which the post-war French state was not responsible.
