A Well Known ‘FRIEND of BIG BUSINESS’
…saved some BIG DRUG COMPANIES some BIG bills.
U.S. court: Victim of Nazis cannot sue German drug companies
A man left sterile by Nazi medical experiments during the Holocaust cannot sue two German drug companies, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of Simon Rozenkier’s lawsuit, saying that his “exclusive remedy” is through a fund set up by the German government in 2000. Rozenkier applied for compensation from that fund and received two checks totaling $9,993 (-7,800), the ruling said.
…U.S. Circuit Judge Alan Lourie wrote that former President Bill Clinton was personally involved in negotiations that established the fund as “the exclusive forum for claims by Nazi-era victims of medical experimentation against German companies.”
How about that. I wonder what the quid pro quo was?
Morality | tree hugging sister | 
August 3, 2006 10:01 am
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Gee, I hope Dave stops by. I’d really like to know how in the world anyone thought that a U.S. court was the place to file a lawsuit against a German company when the tort occurred in Germany.
But the quid pro quo probably involved someone named Monika.
Ken – that’s the thing. The Germans would not have permitted it in their courts. In the 1950s we and they purged those people from those companies, hung some of them, and set up the trust fund. The companies were basically re-constituted and sent on their way. The shareholders of today should not have to pay for the misdeeds of the past. I don’t think this guy got enough compensation from the fund, but going after the companies of today smells like slave reparations to me.
HAH! EXACTly, John. And there are still victims of the Nazis alive, where as corporations here are bending over left and right to disavow something their earliest incarnations did 150 or more years ago. And I’m supposed to pay somebody for that?
I would have phrased it “just a question of f*cking them over“, but I’m a drunk. Or want to be.
The delicious thing was old “Ah Feel Yo Pain” front and center, protecting Bayer and Schering’s German parents. How has this impacted Hillary’s constituency? And what did old AFYP get for it?
Just because the Germans wouldn’t allow it in their courts doesn’t give U.S. courts jurisdiction.
“Gee, I hope Dave stops by. I’d really like to know how in the world anyone thought that a U.S. court was the place to file a lawsuit against a German company when the tort occurred in Germany.”
The Alien Torts Claims Act, that’s how. It’s been around since the lower federal courts were first created by statute in 1789, although it’s really only been actively used fairly recently. As currently codifed at 28 U.S.C. § 1350, it provides, in its entirety:
Crimes against humanity, to the extent they create invidualized and therefore actionable injuries, are obviously also torts “in violation of the law of nations.” But if a special fund was established for this purpose in this particular context, its existence is going to trump ATCA: the canon of statutory construction applicable here being that “the more specific controls over the more general.”
Wow. Thanks Dave! Makes sense now.