A Swiss court has given the go-ahead for hearings to
begin next month in a $12bn lawsuit against IBM by a group
representing Gypsy victims of the Holocaust.
The Gypsy
International Recognition and Compensation Action (GIRCA) - an
association of more than 600 Gypsy organisations - filed a lawsuit
against IBM almost a year ago. The court in Geneva has now ruled
that preliminary hearings can proceed on 20 March.
The suit builds
on claims in Edwin Black's book, IBM and the Holocaust; The
Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful
Corporation, published in 2001.
In the book,
Black argues that IBM and its subsidiaries provided the punch-card
data-processing systems - known as Hollerith machines - that
allowed Nazis to categorise and track concentration camp victims
and that IBM was aware of how its equipment was being used.
The Nazis were
believed to have killed about 600,000 Gypsies, mostly from Central
and Eastern Europe, during the Second World War. Despite recent
settlements in Germany and Switzerland involving surviving victims
of the Holocaust and their descendants, Gypsies have been largely
excluded from compensation plans and other funds.
The lawsuit filed
by GIRCA follows an earlier suit filed by Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust, also based on accusations by author Black.
On behalf of five
Jewish holocaust survivors, US law firm Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld
& Toll filed, and later dropped in 2001, a lawsuit against IBM
over its alleged business ties to the Nazi regime.
By dropping the suit, the firm sought to speed compensation
payments to millions of victims of the Nazis.