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The crisis brings out the wounds of the last war between Greeks and Germans

(credit: Wikipedia)

(BRUSSELS2) The signs of mistrust between Greeks and Germans have gone up a notch with the resurgence of a debate that we thought was buried, reparations for the last world war.

Thirty Greek deputies from several political parties - except Laos and the Communist Party according to the Greek press - thus asked last week for the organization of a parliamentary debate on this point. According to them, Germany has paid? damages to? all the countries concerned, on the basis of the decisions of the inter-allied commission of Paris, in 1946, except... a? Greece. And they demand redress for this injustice.

A debate which appears as a return to crank the German pressure on Greece so that it accepts a stronger budgetary discipline. A debate that today can only be political and no longer legal, after the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Friday (February 3), which ended a long legal dispute between Italy, to which associated Greece on one side, and Germany, on the other.

Italian and Greek plaintiffs

The ICJ has in fact just ruled in favor of Germany in the face of Italian and Greek plaintiffs, claiming reparations for war damage. The Italian plaintiffs were essentially former Italian soldiers interned in German camps after 1943, when Italy switched sides, joining the Allies against Germany; plaintiffs who had not succeeded in being compensated by the various arrangements put in place between Italy and Germany (*).

The second were the Greek beneficiaries of the village of Distomo, a village which suffered a massacre on June 10, 1944 identical to that of Oradour sur Glane: the Waffen SS troops, attacked by partisans, had taken revenge on the first village came, massacring men, women and children, leaving more than 200 dead. In 1995, the beneficiaries of the victims obtained before a Greek court of first instance the condemnation of Germany, on September 25, 1997, a decision confirmed in cassation on May 4, 2000 but never executed in Greece because the authorization of the minister of justice was never given. The applicants successively appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and then to the Supreme Court in Germany, each time being opposed to State immunity. They then turned to the Italian courts to enforce this decision, following the example given by the Italians.

International humanitarian law cannot trump state immunity

The Court follows purely legal reasoning. It does not rule on the illegality of the act - disputed by any of the parties, moreover. “In the current state of customary international law, a State is not deprived? immunity? for the sole reason that he is accused? serious violations of international human rights law or the international law of armed conflict” she considers. The Court considers that there is no more conflict between the rules of jus cogens (the rules of armed conflict) and the rules of procedure which confer immunity on a State, and that one should not predominate on the other. The rules " which govern immunity? of the State are limited to? determine whether the courts of a state are founded? exercise their jurisdiction a? towards another; they are irrelevant to the question of whether the behavior has? in respect of which the actions were committed was lawful or unlawful. "

(*) Several measures were implemented to compensate the victims of the Nazi regime: first the peace treaty in 1947 (mainly aimed at the property of Italian nationals in Germany), then the federal law of 1953 (which targeted a few categories of victims, such as residents in Germany) and a 1961 Italian-German agreement with lump sum compensation to the Italian State of 40 million German marks, and finally the "memory, responsibility and future" law of August 2000 which essentially targeted forced laborers. But several categories of people remained excluded from this compensation process, in particular prisoners of war, who were not civilians and not forced, according to the German Constitutional Court, since prisoners of war can in certain cases be subjected to work. ..

download the ICJ judgment

Nicolas Gros Verheyde

Chief editor of the B2 site. Graduated in European law from the University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and listener to the 65th session of the IHEDN (Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale. Journalist since 1989, founded B2 - Bruxelles2 in 2008. EU/NATO correspondent in Brussels for Sud-Ouest (previously West-France and France-Soir).

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