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Helene Lipietz (L) and her brother Alain give a press conference 27 March 2007 in Paris after a French Appeal Court overturned a conviction handed down on the state rail company SNCF for its role in the deportation of two Jewish men during World War II. The case centred on a suit 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. They both survived the war. The Lipietz family said it will now take the
Photo: AFP Copyright 2007
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PARIS (EJP)--- A French Appeal Court in Bordeaux Tuesday overturned a conviction handed down on the French state railway operator SNCF for its role in the deportation of two Jewish men in Nazi-occupied France, EJP has learned.
Lawyers representing SNCF last February had urged the court to overturn the ruling by an administrative court in Toulouse in June 2006 ordering the group and the French government to pay 61,000 euros to the family of Georges Lipietz, a Polish-born Jew arrested by French police and taken by train to the Drancy transit camp near Paris in 1944.
In its judgement, the administrative court of appeal in the southwestern city of Bordeaux said that the case was "outside the jurisdiction of the Toulouse court."
“The SNCF is a legal entity in its own right and therefore subject to a judiciary court,” it said.
Administrative courts in France normally judge suits brought against the state.
Lipietz, aged 21 at the time, was arrested with his 15 year-old half brother and taken in a cattle wagon to a camp at Drancy outside Paris where they spent three months before the allied victory saved them from being sent to Auschwitz or another death camp.
Since launching the action in 2001, he has died but members of his family, including his son Alain, a Green member of the European Parliament, have continued the case.
Other lawsuits
Some 76,000 Jews were arrested in France during WWII and transported in appalling conditions in railway boxcars to concentration camps such as Auschwitz where most died.
Nearly 1,800 people have brought a lawsuit for compensation to the SNCF for what they consider as its responsibility in the deportation of a member of their family.
The Lipietz family said Tuesday it will now take the case to the State Council in Paris, which acts as France's highest administrative court.
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The rail operator company had appealed, saying it had been only an “instrument” of the German army and that it had been forced to obey the orders of the government of the time.
President Jacques Chirac officially acknowledged French complicity in the wartime deportation of Jews for the first time in 1995.
But it was not until a ruling in 2001 that it has been possible to sue French authorities for compensation.