Bobigny (AFP)

The administrative court of Cergy-Pontoise ordered the hospital of Pontoise to continue the treatments which artificially keep a 74 year old patient in a coma for a month, "without hope of improvement" according to his doctors, said Wednesday this jurisdiction.

In an order made on Tuesday, the judge in summary proceedings, seized by one of the children of the patient opposed to the cessation of treatment, ordered the René-Dubos hospital center in Pontoise (Val-d'Oise) to "not put implement "the decision taken by the doctors unfavorable to its artificial maintenance alive, on January 30.

At the end of several examinations and a collegial procedure, the doctor in charge of the septuagenarian, hospitalized since January 17 due to a coma following a cerebrovascular accident, had concluded in a "lack of neurological improvement" without "therapeutic solution curative possible ", and had informed the family.

The administrative justice had chosen to appoint an expert to obtain a new opinion on the patient's condition, irreversible or not. The purpose of these expert reports is in particular to determine whether the continuation of treatment is unreasonable obstinacy, a cornerstone of the Claeys-Leonetti law on end of life.

However, in his conclusions submitted on February 10, the expert indicates that stopping treatment, that is, the end of feeding and hydration, is "difficult to envisage" because the patient is not in a coma " exceeded ".

"The only circumstance that a patient, elderly, is in a state of coma + deep + without hope of improvement cannot characterize, by itself, a situation in which the continuation of the treatment would appear unjustified in the name of the refusal of the unreasonable obstinacy ", considers the administrative court.

The Vincent Lambert case, an emblematic figure in the end-of-life debate, had raised this thorny question of relentless therapeutic action brought before the courts. In a vegetative state for nearly eleven years, he died on July 11, 2019 in Reims, at the end of a mediatized legal marathon, eight days after the cessation of his treatments which his parents opposed.

© 2020 AFP