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Mediator affair: Laurent Fabius returns to Bordeaux to explain the decision of the Constitutional Council

2023-03-10T15:59:29.624Z


The President of the Constitutional Council went again to Bordeaux this Friday, to present the decision of the Elders, seized of a priority question of constitutionality within the framework of the case of the drug from Servier laboratories.


Le Figaro Bordeaux

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A respectful silence settles among the lawyers and the students gathered in the Léon Duguit amphitheater, close to the National School of the Judiciary and the town hall of Bordeaux.

The city welcomes for the second time in month of a month Laurent Fabius, president of the Constitutional Council.

"

I reassured, if necessary, the mayor of Bordeaux, telling him that neither I nor one of my colleagues, former mayor of Bordeaux, had the intention of introducing ourselves

", he jokes in the introduction. .

But it is for a serious business that the former Prime Minister is back, to inform of a decision of the Elders in the context of the infamous Mediator affair.

The Constitutional Council only judges the form, not the substance.

As guarantor of respect for the Constitution, he is required to examine whether the law does not contravene the supreme norm of the country.

Since 2010, a new mechanism allows a litigant to request referral to the Constitutional Council: the priority question of constitutionality (QPC).

This mechanism allows everyone, during a trial, to challenge the constitutionality of the law applied to them.

This is what happened in the Mediator case, a QPC having been examined by the Constitutional Council in a public hearing on February 21.

This having taken place in Bordeaux, on the occasion of a relocation of the Council, the president returned two weeks later to present the decision of the Elders.

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In front of an attentive crowd, the President of the Council recalled the facts.

Mr B., who was prescribed Mediator from 2004 to 2009 (date of suspension of the drug's authorization on the market), was diagnosed with cardiac pathologies in 2006. He went to court and, eight years later, an expert report concluded a causal link between taking the drug and his pathologies.

He then sued the Servier laboratories.

In 2020, the court found the pharmaceutical group liable.

But in 2022, the Versailles Court of Appeal overturned this decision.

In the meantime, Mr B. has died.

But the resulting legal maze can still last for many years.

The case then came before the Court of Cassation, which sent a QPC to the Constitutional Council.

“A terrible length of the procedure”

The question examined was the following: the provisions of the Civil Code - which provide exemptions from liability in certain specific cases, depending on whether the damage was caused by an element of the human body (such as blood products) or by medication - contravene- to the principle of equality before the law?

This principle, recognized by article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, has a constitutional value.

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After deliberation, the Elders of the rue de Montpensier concluded that the articles of the Civil Code in question did indeed respect the principle of equality before the law and that they were therefore not unconstitutional.

The principle of equality is not opposed either to the legislator regulating different situations differently, or to derogating from equality for reasons of general interest, provided that, in one and in the other case, the resulting difference in treatment is directly related to the object of the law which establishes it

”, believe the Sages.

Lamenting the "

appalling length of the procedure

", Laurent Fabius recalls, however, that "

extraordinary cases must be dealt with in an ordinary way

", and that the Constitutional Council is not there to write or comment on the law, but to verify that it is in accordance with the principles protected by the Constitution.

A new “QPC & Libertés” university degree at the University of Bordeaux

The University of Bordeaux took advantage of the visit of the President of the Constitutional Council this Friday to announce the opening in October 2023 of a university degree, "QPC & freedoms", intended for legal professionals.

A qualifying profession “unique in France”, which benefits from the support of the Elders of rue de Montpensier.

Pauline Gervier, lecturer in public law at the University of Bordeaux, affirms that this training will have the ambition "to better identify the grievances of potentiality in the various fields of law" of the QPC, in order to achieve, when necessary , to "purge the law of its venom".

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2023-03-10

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