The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed on Wednesday July 5 the abandonment of the prosecution for injuries and manslaughter in the case of asbestos poisoning on the Parisian university campus of Jussieu from the 1960s to 1990s, learned the Agence France-Presse (AFP) from a source familiar with the matter. The investigation, begun in 1996 and which targeted the university and several of its officials, was concluded by a dismissal in February 2022, but the Jussieu Anti-Asbestos Committee and the National Association of Asbestos Victims (AVA) had appealed.
In their order, three investigating magistrates from the Paris public health center had estimated that there were not sufficient charges to send anyone to court for injury, manslaughter or endangering the lives of others. It is “not possible to link the damage to possible faults that could be attributed – with certainty – to persons having a responsibility for the exposure to asbestos”, they concluded.
According to the source close to the case, the magistrates of the investigating chamber confirmed on Wednesday this dismissal for the heart of the case, namely the injuries and involuntary homicides and endangering the lives of others under the risk asbestos. On the other hand, they sent the file back to the investigating judges for two secondary points, including that of endangering the lives of others in respect of the risk of fire in the premises.
An “incomplete” instruction
As in other cases, the magistrates instructing that of Jussieu relied on a judicial expertise of 2017, which considers it impossible to deduce with precision the moment of the exposure of the employees to this carcinogenic fiber and that of their contamination, and therefore to establish criminal liability. “We do not want to instruct in France this type of responsibility, those of institutional decision-makers”, lamented after the deliberation on Wednesday Michel Parigot, head of the AVA, who intends to lodge an appeal in cassation. For him, the instruction is “incomplete”.
Of all the investigations into this health scandal, that of Jussieu is one of the most emblematic: it was from this Parisian faculty that, in the 1970s, the first major mobilization denouncing asbestos poisoning, used for the construction of buildings. But after more than two decades of investigations, the twenty or so asbestos cases investigated in Paris have been ending for several years without being referred to court.
In the wake of these setbacks in the criminal justice system, victims of asbestos filed a direct summons in November 2021 with the Paris judicial court, in order to lead to the trial of fourteen people, in particular for homicides and involuntary injuries and complicity of aggravated deception. But the Paris court declared their request inadmissible in mid-May. The complainants wanted these fourteen former representatives of ministries, business leaders or doctors, aged 62 to 84, to answer for their links with the Asbestos Standing Committee (CPA).
This organization was described in a 2005 Senate report as a pro-asbestos “lobby” active between 1982 and 1995, when all varieties of asbestos had been classified as carcinogenic by the World Health Organization (WHO) since 1977. In 2012, health authorities estimated that asbestos, the use of which has been banned in France since 1997, could cause 3,000 deaths each year by 2025 from cancer of the pleura or bronchopulmonary cancer.
