Deputies and senators have reached an agreement on the bill extending the state of health emergency, with a view to adoption by the Parliament on Saturday, with a compromise on the sensitive point of the criminal responsibility of decision-makers, according to parliamentary sources. The text, which extends the state of health emergency until July 10, must now be validated today by the Senate and the Assembly, whose vote will be worth final adoption.
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Criminal responsibility of public decision-makers
The deputies and the senators found a compromise on the penal responsibility of the public decision-makers as private, brought to take measures to allow the exit of confinement. The Senate had voted at the beginning of the week a device to manage this responsibility, by invoking in particular the concerns of certain mayors, who fear being implicated in case of transmission of the coronavirus during the reopening of the schools from Monday.
But the Assembly had completely revised the device, in a new version challenged by the opposition, which saw it as a way of "removing responsibility" from the government, in the event of procedures on its management of the crisis. And each side accused each other of organizing a form of "impunity".
The compromise version finally proposes a modification of the public health code to take into account the "competences, powers and means" available to "the perpetrator", in "the crisis situation which justified the state of health emergency".
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Monitoring file linked to Health Insurance
Deputies and senators also agreed on the other sensitive point of the text: the establishment of a follow-up of patients with coronavirus thanks to an "information system", a follow-up file linked to Health Insurance.
The parliamentarians limited the backup of the data in this file to three months, different from the StopCovid application project, still in the testing phase. The president of the LR group in the National Assembly Damien Abad estimated that "two red lines have been lifted", and announced that his group would vote for the text thus modified the same day.
PS deputies and senators indicate that they will vote against, "even if there is progress": "our main criticism is that there is nothing in the text on the social emergency".
The bill extending the state of health emergency also provides for the possibility of quarantine or isolation upon arrival on national territory in certain cases. President Emmanuel Macron has already announced that he will seize the Constitutional Council to verify the legality of the text, while the oppositions have expressed their concerns.