It was the last major criminal case involving asbestos under investigation, and it is now closed without prosecution: the Court of Cassation on Wednesday brought an end to the judicial inquiry into asbestos on the Parisian campus of Jussieu, ruling that the universities could not be held criminally liable.
The highest judicial court dismissed an appeal by civil parties, considering that in this 30-year-old investigation, the criminal responsibility of Sorbonne-Université and Paris-Cité University, respective successors to Paris VI and Paris VII universities which were housed on the Jussieu campus, could not be upheld for legal reasons.
Paris VI and Paris VII were placed under formal investigation in January 2005.
But in a dismissal order issued in February 2022, three investigating magistrates from the public health unit in Paris determined that there was insufficient evidence to bring anyone to trial for injuries, manslaughter, or endangering the lives of others.
As in other cases, the magistrates investigating the Jussieu case relied on a 2017 judicial expert report, which deemed it impossible to accurately deduce the time of the employees' exposure to this carcinogenic fiber and the time of their contamination, and therefore to establish criminal liability.
The appeal judges had in July 2023 deemed the public action extinguished, due to changes in the legal structure of the universities.
The case had been referred back to the investigating judges for a secondary aspect, concerning the fire risk.
The criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation considered on Wednesday, according to a press release, that in general, a public institution born from the merger of two universities could "see its criminal liability engaged for acts committed by these universities before the merger".
But in the name of the "principle of predictability of criminal law" and in "the absence of fraud", this does not apply to the Jussieu case, because the university mergers are prior to November 2020, "the date on which the Court of Cassation (...) first established the principle of the transfer of criminal responsibility", the statement adds.
– “Code of silence” –
Michel Parigot, head of the National Association of Asbestos Victims (AVA), told AFP that this decision "confirms the will of the judicial institution not to investigate this case".
"The reasons are well known. They were implicating high-ranking civil servants and government ministries, and that's what completely blocked things. The Jussieu case was the last case, it's over," he lamented.
Of all the investigations into this health scandal, the one on Jussieu is one of the most emblematic: it was from this Parisian faculty that the first major mobilization denouncing asbestos poisoning began in the 1970s.
The investigation was opened in 1996 after the first complaints were filed, when the first occupational diseases appeared among the faculty staff.
The plaintiffs pointed out that asbestos was present in the flocking of a large part of the buildings on the Jussieu campus built between 1964 and 1972.
The first protective works were carried out at the end of the 1970s and only concerned the ground floor, they added, denouncing a "code of silence".
After several decades of investigations, the twenty or so asbestos cases investigated in Paris have, for several years now, resulted in no referral to a court, with rare exceptions.
In the wake of these setbacks in criminal court, asbestos victims have opened another avenue in criminal proceedings, filing a direct summons in Paris in November 2021, in order to bring 14 people to trial, notably for manslaughter and involuntary injury and complicity in aggravated deception.
Their application was declared inadmissible in May 2023, and they appealed.
No date has been set at this stage, according to Mr. Parigot, who believes that asbestos victims have the right to even longer delays than those usually granted by criminal justice.
According to a report published in 2014, by 2050 the number of deaths due to asbestos, the use of which has been banned in France since 1997, could reach at least 70,000 deaths, according to a conservative estimate.
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