“Criminal Trial for Asbestos Victims Denied by French Justice in Disappointing Decision”

This is a new disappointment for the victims of asbestos. Nearly 2,000 of them hoped to obtain a criminal trial against 14 people who had national responsibilities. However, this Friday, May 19, 2023, justice considered “inadmissible” a direct summons filed in November 2021. A decision which arouses the dismay of victims’ associations in Brittany.

September 6, 1996: the Paris prosecutor’s office opened the first criminal proceedings (against X) for exposure to asbestos, after the complaint of an electrician suffering from cancer of the pleura. Since then, business has followed at the same pace as non-places.

Recognizing criminal responsibility in the asbestos health scandal remains the stated objective of several victims’ associations, but “without great illusion sometimes”according Julien Le Calvar, vice-president of the association for the defense of asbestos victims in Morbihan.

“When someone files a criminal complaint saying ‘my employer caused this to happen to me 60 years ago’, it doesn’t hold up, he indicates. The penal likes to work in the moment. The more time passes, the more we will go towards erasure and abandonment.

This Friday, May 19, the Paris Criminal Court ruled “inadmissible” the direct quote launched in 2021 by 1,850 plaintiffs.

This procedure targeted 14 people, business leaders, doctors, political leaders, accused of having delayed the banning of this fiber ccarcinogenic in the late 1970s.

Unless there is an exceptional and temporary derogation, asbestos has been banned in France since 1997. “Only 1997, deplores Michel Parigot, head of the national association of asbestos victims. At the time when everything was known, at the end of the 1970s, industrialists organized themselves and set up a lobbying structure so that asbestos was not banned, that no protective measures were taken , to be able to freely continue to use this carcinogenic material and knowing all the risks.”

On the side of the Brittany foundry in Caudan, former employees are also considering filing a criminal complaint against their employer. “In Italy people have been sentenced, indicates Tahar Bejaoui, representative of the CGT retired section of the Foundry of Brittany. We’ll have to come up with something. We are not asking for money but recognition of the error.

According to the High Council of Public Health, asbestos could be responsible for 70,000 to 100,000 deaths by 2050.

(With Yoann Etienne)