Paris (AFP)
Lawyers challenged Thursday with the investigating judges responsible for an investigation into the poisoning of the Antilles with chlordecone the possible prescription of the facts and intend to file a complaint with the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), learned the 'AFP Friday with them.
Me Rachid Madid and Olivier Tabone, lawyers for the Medical Association for the Protection of the Environment and Health (Amses), confirmed to AFP the information from Liberation according to which they filed a brief with the judges in order to challenge the legal analysis of the latter on the issue of prescription, based on "points of procedure, jurisprudence and development of the law" in the matter.
They also called for the offense of "manslaughter" to be retained.
"We received a very favorable reception" from the judges, said the lawyers.
In this case, which has now been investigated for 14 years by the public health department of the Paris judicial court, the investigating judges notified several civil parties in mid-January of their analysis according to which the facts would be predominantly prescribed.
According to the report of some of these civil parties to the press, the investigating judges also indicated that evidence had disappeared.
The analysis was recently supported by the Paris prosecutor in an interview with the daily France Antilles: "the vast majority of the facts denounced were already prescribed" from the filing of complaints in 2006 for poisoning with chlordecone in Guadeloupe and Martinique, assured mid-March Rémy Heitz.
In 2006, several associations from Martinique and Guadeloupe had filed three complaints for poisoning, endangering the lives of others and administration of harmful substances.
A new large mobilization is planned for April 10 in Martinique to denounce a possible non-place, in this file which has already been the subject of large mobilizations in the West Indies.
The two lawyers also announced their intention to file a complaint Friday against several former ministers with the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), the only one empowered to judge the acts of members of the government in the exercise of their functions.
They accuse them of having "extended the authorization for the use of chlordecone" and signed decrees, in particular in 2005, which authorized residues of chlordecone in the diet with tolerable thresholds "according to them far too high.
Chlordecone, a pesticide banned in France in 1990 but which continued to be authorized in the banana fields of Martinique and Guadeloupe by ministerial exemption until 1993, caused significant and lasting pollution of the two islands.
More than 90% of the adult population in Guadeloupe and Martinique is contaminated by chlordecone, according to Public Health France, and the West Indian populations have one of the highest incidence rate of prostate cancer in the world.
© 2021 AFP