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An official report said that there was a problem with the dock gate lock system of the Estonia ferry
A Paris court rejected a claim for compensation following the sinking of the Estonian ferry in 1994.
More than 1,000 survivors and relatives of the victims claimed 40.8 million euros (36.6 million pounds sterling) from the French agency that had found the ship fit to sail and the German shipbuilder.
But the court said the asylum seekers had not proved their "intentional fault".
The sinking of the MS Estonia killed 852 people, making it one of the deadliest maritime disasters in the history of Europe.
The ship was leaving Estonia for Sweden on 28 September 1994 after sinking into the Baltic Sea. Most of the pbadengers aboard the ship got stuck inside after the capsize, while 97 people who managed to leave the ship died in the icy water. There were 137 survivors.
- Estonian victims rest at sea
- "I took her hand and then we jumped".
An official report on the 1997 incident concluded that the disaster was due to a problem with the front door lock system.
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The survivors and their relatives were compensated by the owner of the ferry for loss and damage. But the claim for compensation from the French certification agency Bureau Veritas and the German shipbuilder Meyer Werft, presented by 1,116 plaintiffs, was rejected on Friday.
The court of the western suburbs of Paris, in Nanterre, said in a statement that the plaintiffs had not proved "the existence of a serious or intentional fault attributable to the company Bureau Veritas and / or Meyer Werft ".
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More than 850 people were killed in the sinking of the Estonian ferry in September 1994
Henning Witte, a German lawyer representing relatives of the case, called the verdict "big disappointment", while stating that his clients "were not expecting anything from the court".
"This ruling was not a surprise for us today, we have been subjected to such mistreatment by the judiciary over the years," he told the BBC.
Lawyers have the opportunity to choose where they hear a case involving two or more countries of the European Union, and France was selected for the record of Estonia as it was considered "endowed with the most modern law in terms of damages, "Witte said.
He added that the case, which had originally been filed in September 1996, had taken decades to be heard despite the delays of the court. It was not yet clear whether an appeal would be filed.
What happened to MS Estonia?
The MS Estonia was a ferry-boat carrying cars and pbadengers that connected Estonia in Sweden with 989 pbadengers and crew members when the bad weather and the high seas had sank it off Finnish coasts.
A member of the crew who survived the accident told the BBC that he had seen a boarding gate open and sink a few minutes before the sinking of the ship .
Residents of 17 countries lost their lives in the disaster. Of the 852 people killed, 501 were Swedish and 285 were Estonian.
The disaster of Estonia is the second deadliest European ship that sinks after the Titanic.
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