It is a painful subject on which the highest administrative jurisdiction in the country will have to work. The association Adikia, through the voice of its lawyer Grégoire Etrillard, seized this Monday the Council of State to request the repeal of the recommendations of the High Authority for Health (HAS) relating to the shaken baby syndrome.
This head trauma, which affects between 200 and 400 infants each year, usually occurs when an adult, exasperated by crying, violently shakes the child. A gesture that can lead to irreversible consequences - even the death of the baby - and prosecution for their author, most often one of the parents, who then faces prison.
Nearly 200 couples have joined the Adikia association
Developed in 2011 and completed in 2017, the recommendations of the HAS aim to enable health professionals to establish the diagnosis, in the hospital, but also during judicial expert opinions which then weigh very heavily before the courts.
Several parents, believing themselves wrongly accused, have been speaking for several months in the press and nearly 200 couples have joined the Adikia association, founded in 2017. Lawyer of fifty of these “broken families”, Maître Grégoire Etrillard had officially written to HAS last December asking it to repeal its recommendations, a text that has become a reference in the medical and judicial world but whose legitimacy would be highly questionable in the absence of global scientific consensus.
"These recommendations were developed by a working group of which no member is specialized in pediatric neurology," denounces Master Grégoire Etrillard. Members who are also regularly called upon to provide forensic expertise in these files, or even second opinions… which are based on a text that they themselves have written! It then becomes impossible to issue a dissonant opinion, ”annoys the criminal.
He recalls that serious scientific publications, especially abroad, believe that alternative diagnoses to shaken baby syndrome exist, with the same symptoms. “However, the recommendations reject these hypotheses and present as certain the shaking, even date it. They thus create a presumption of guilt on the parent in question from which we can no longer escape, ”he regrets.
"This text is a machine of judicial error"
"Contesting on the recommendations is the wrong subject," defended the HAS in December in a press release co-signed with some twenty specialized structures, which "refuse to leave without questioning the questioning of competence and probity scientist of their experts ".
"This text is nothing more or less a machine for miscarriage of justice," persists the lawyer, pointing to disastrous consequences on a human level: children placed for years, couples separated by justice, divorces and even suicides ...
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Even beyond the scientific debate, the lawyer believes that with this publication, the HAS exceeds its role and that is the subject of the appeal for "excess of power" filed on Monday. "The Council of State," he reminds, "is not intended to issue a scientific truth but to note that the publication of the HAS does not reflect the current state of knowledge on the subject. "
