28 March 2007
A French appeals court has overturned a lower court's ruling which had ordered the national railway company, SNCF, to compensate two Jews deported on its trains in Nazi-occupied France. Tuesday's ruling in Bordeaux might affect a larger class-action suit filed against SNCF in similar cases. The appeals court accepted the SNCF argument that the case, first brought to trial in June 2006, was not within the jurisdiction of the Toulouse administrative court, which had ordered SNCF to pay some € 61,000 (US$ 80,000) to the family of Georges Lipietz. Lipietz, a Polish-born Jew, was 15 when French police arrested him and his brother and took them in a cattle wagon to the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. Lipietz spent three months at the camp before being liberated at the end of the war. Most Jews held at Drancy were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
Lipietz died after launching the complaint in 2001, but family members, including his son Alain, a Green Party politician, continued the case. They succeeded in establishing shared responsibility of SNCF and the French government for the deportation. That ruling, the first of its kind in France, opened the door to a class-action suit involving up to 1,800 plaintiffs, which is expected to be deliberated in the coming year.
The Bordeaux ruling means that plaintiffs will now have to bring their cases before civil or criminal courts, where lawyers say they have far less chance of success. "This is an extraordinarily important decision and will weigh heavily," SNCF lawyer Yves Baudelot told the Reuters news agency, adding: "This decision shows SNCF acted under coercion and had no room for maneuver."
