ROME (JTA) — Italy’s highest court said previous accords do not exempt Germany from paying damages to the families of victims of World War II Nazi war crimes.
Italy’s Court of Cassation ruled in October that Germany must pay more than $1 million in damages to a small number of relatives of 203 men, women and children massacred by German soldiers in central Tuscany in 1944.
On Tuesday, the court published the explanation of its ruling. It said that an accord from 1961 governing war crimes compensation only pertained to claims pending at that time and not claims brought at a later date.
Germany filed an appeal in December with the International Court of Justice saying that in ordering the payments, Italy fell "short of its obligations to respect the immunity of a sovereign nation such as Germany by virtue of international law."
