Criminal trial of asbestos health scandal should open at end of 2023, twenty-six years after

The calendar will be fixed during a public hearing at the Paris judicial court, after a thousand eight hundred victims and beneficiaries have filed an unprecedented collective citation, aimed at fourteen “national actors”.

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Yvette rent barely dares to believe it. This time, justice will hear it, it and some thousand eight hundred complainants. Wednesday, October 26, the 31 e Correctional chamber of the Paris judicial court, specializing in litigation linked to the environment and public health, should deliver the calendar of the criminal trial during which will be tried, to The end of 2023, fourteen “national actors” of the asbestos health scandal. This has already cost the life, in France, to more than one hundred thousand people, including Jean, the husband of Yvette Loyer, in 2014. And he is, today even more, at the origin of some three a thousand deaths each year.

Asbestos industrialists, senior officials of the Ministries of Industry, Labor and Health or Doctors, the fourteen people targeted by a direct collective quote, in which the 75 -year -old Dunkirk took part, have in Common to have been members, between 1982 and 1995, of the Standing Asbestos Committee (CPA) or to have participated in its actions. They are all quoted to appear for unintentional homicides and injuries, non-assistance to person in danger, complicity in aggravated deception, complicity in administration of harmful substances and association of criminals with a view to administering harmful substances. Infractions punishable by maximum prison sentences from three to ten years and maximum penalties of fines from 45,000 to 300,000 euros.

Informal lobbying structure created in 1982 and funded by asbestos manufacturers, the CPA is accused by complainants of having knowingly organized the dissemination of false information on the risks linked to the use of asbestos, to have worked to delay its ban at the national and European level and to have prevented the implementation of protective regulations. He would have deliberately exposed “the whole of the French population to this fatal product, despite the existence of an indisputable scientific consensus” and would, as such, be “directly responsible for the diseases and the deaths of several dozen of thousands of victims “.

of asbestos, material massively used worldwide in the 20th century ^{e century for its mechanical resistance but also for its insulating and fireproof properties, and prohibited in France since 1997, Yvette Loyer says that he is “a killing beast”. Between two sobs, she tells how, happy retired sharing long steps and mold fishing games with her husband, then 67 years old, she turned helpless witness to her six -month agony. >}

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