The applicants want to obtain official documents on the Covid-19 crisis.

Drawing.

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Mourad Allili - Sipa

  • Four health user associations are undertaking a “class action” on the management of the health crisis.

  • Their procedure consists of asking the courts to order various bodies to release documents to them.

  • Without sinking into conspiracy, they want to know if these pieces could feed into future trials.

They believe they have "the right to know" and want to judge the management of the health crisis on the spot.

Four associations of users and "citizens" announced this Thursday to initiate a procedure, in "class action" mode, to verify "the statements of each other" on the measures taken during this Covid-19 epidemic.

This “250-page” appeal, filed with the Judicial Court of Paris, takes a rather original form.

This is a “probationary referral”.

The objective is to ask the justice to order an entity - Directorate General of Health (DGS), Ehpad, company, or others - to provide documents.

“The idea is to gather evidence with a view to a future trial,” explains Christophe Lèguevaques, the lawyer co-founder of the collective action platform MySmartCab.

Avoid the "pitfall" of conspiracy

"We want to obtain documents, to examine them quietly, with if necessary experts," he continues, rushing into the narrow lane between what he calls "government propaganda" and "the pitfall. confusionism ”, in other words, conspiracy.

The pieces that the associations wish to be communicated cut across several major themes, first and foremost that of masks.

“For example, we all know that millions of masks have been destroyed when there was a sorely lack of them,” illustrates the lawyer.

There is a report on the subject, we are asking the courts to force the DGS to communicate it to us ”.

Among the applicants, a Parisian woman also wants to know why her parents' nursing home did not distribute the masks she had to her caregivers at the start of the first wave.

The other themes are even more controversial, with in particular the thorny question of “therapeutic choices” or a possible “sorting of patients”.

“We want records and clear answers on these questions.

We cannot judge without having concrete elements ”, underlines Annie Notelet, president of the Union Prévention Gestion des crises santé (UPGCS), an association founded in 2017 in the midst of the Levothyrox affair.

She deplores that we do not "give the floor to users" during this crisis.

The Clé-Autistes association would like to see more clearly on the measures of deprivation of liberty taken in medico-social establishments during the first confinement.

"Me, I refuse that we are considered as acceptable deaths because we are disabled", storms Odile Maurin, stirring activist of accessibility with her Handi-social association, "yellow vest" at his time, and now municipal councilor of opposition to Toulouse.

Everything about the coronavirus

It remains to be seen whether this "class action" will be deemed admissible by the court.

And if in this case the documents eventually communicated will give ground to grind for future trials.

According to Christophe Lèguevaques, the hearing should take place in January 2021.

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  • Covid 19

  • Coronavirus

  • Justice

  • Toulouse

  • Society