Eleven members of the pro-euthanasia association Ultime Liberté were indicted in Paris in an investigation into trafficking in pentobarbital, a barbiturate banned in France and sometimes used for assisted suicide, the association said on Saturday.
"Eleven members of the association Ultime Liberté including the president, the general secretary, the vice-president, were indicted" between Wednesday and Friday, indicates the association in a press release.
These activists had been placed in police custody in mid-January on the decision of an investigating judge from the public health department of the court.
This magistrate is in charge since June 18, 2020 of these investigations which relate to suspicions of “illegal importation, possession, acquisition and use of substances classified as psychotropic”, as well as “illegal exercise of the profession of pharmacist” and of "Propaganda or complicity in the propaganda of products allowing suicide".
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These members of the association must answer for a number of acts committed between August 2018 and November 2020, according to the association's press release.
"These acts are considered illegal under certain articles of current French law", according to the press release.
“For a large part of these acts (...) we do not deny having been the authors, nor that they may be in violation of some of these current articles of law.
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An investigation started in 2019
The investigating judge's investigations followed on from those started on July 26, 2019 by the Paris prosecutor's office, after the transmission by the American authorities of a list of French recipients of packages that may contain pentobarbital, a powerful anesthetic banned in France. since 1996 for human medicine.
125 French buyers had been identified.
During a hundred searches in October 2019, 130 vials of this product, diverted by people wishing to end their lives, had been seized.
Manufactured by a Danish laboratory which holds the exclusive license for production in the United States, pentobarbital is used by veterinarians to euthanize animals.
