Herero Genocide case

Country of proceedings: United States
Context of crimes: Namibia
Date: 2001 - 2007
Keywords: Accountability (private contractors), Genocide, Crimes against humanity

Court Documents
06-09-2001 - Complaint
11-06-2004 - Case dismissed (no actionable claim)
15-11-2004 - Supreme Court denies certiorari
17-01-2006 - District Court dismisses case against Woermann
05-04-2006 - District Court dismisses case against Deutsche Bank
10-04-2007 - US Court of Appeals affirms decision to dismiss the case

Additional information
BBC News, A bloody history: Namibia's colonisation, 29 August 2001
BBC News, Germany admits Namibia genocide, 14 August 2004

Presentation of the case
In 2001, members of the Herero Tribe filed a complaint for $2 billion in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, later moved to the US District Court for the District of Columbia. According to the complaint, the defendants, Deutsche Bank AG, Terex Corporation and Woermann Line (renamed as Deutsche-Afrika-Linien) financed the German colonial government and companies linked to its colonial rule in Southwest Africa – now Namibia. The claimants alleged that the alliance:

“relentlessly pursued the enslavement and the genocidal destruction of the Herero Tribe […] Foreshadowing with chilling precision the irredeemable horror of the European Holocaust only decades later, the defendants and Imperial Germany formed a German commercial enterprise which cold-bloodedly employed explicitly-sanctioned extermination, the destruction of tribal culture and social organization, concentration camps, forced labor, medical experimentation and the exploitation of women and children in order to advance their common financial interests.”

The events giving rise to the claim largely took place between 1904 and 1907 when, in response to an uprising against German colonial rule, the German Schutztruppe (‘colonial troops’) perpetrated atrocities allegedly causing the deaths of some 80% of the Herero population, according to the 1985 UN Whitaker Report.

On 11 June 2004 the case was dismissed for failure to bring an actionable claim. Following an appeal, the US Supreme Court denied certiorari to hear the case.

The case against Deutsche Bank was subsequently refiled in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, but dismissed in April 2006 since the case was substantially the same as the previous case upon which a judgment had already been given.

The case against Woermann was also refiled, but the US District Court of New Jersey dismissed the claim under the Alien Tort Claims Act in January 2006. After the decision was appealed, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the Judgment on 10 April 2007.

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