IIt took four years for the investigating commission of the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) to conclude that there are no serious or consistent clues to suggest that former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe ( 2017-2020) and the former ministers of health Agnès Buzyn (2017-2020) or Olivier Véran (2020-2022) may have committed an offense in the management of the pandemic.
The resulting lack of indictment now makes it likely that there will be a triple dismissal in this lamentable affair, which demonstrates, once again, the fundamental inadequacy of criminal law to control the exercise of ministerial functions.
The health crisis of 2020 was the occasion for a worrying mass increase in the use of complaints against public decision-makers, favored by the use of social networks and the Internet which, during the period of confinement, was more intense than ever.
Complexity of the decision-making process
Filed by the thousands before the public health center of the Paris prosecutor's office or, when they concerned ministers, before the CJR, the complaints denounced everything and its opposite, from the compulsory vaccination campaign to the abstention from action, including the containment or deconfinement measures. The whole thing was captured under legal qualifications that were as imaginative as they were legally fragile, from “voluntary homicide” to “violence against minors,” from “voluntary abstention from fighting a disaster” to “deliberately endangering the life of a person.” 'other'.
This Prévert-style inventory should alone be enough to convince us of the difficulty of grasping, through criminal incriminations, the complexity of the decision-making process at the top of the State. We too often forget that governing consists of deciding between opposing interests so that damage, whether we like it or not, is inherent in the political decision. Confinement means protecting, but it also means sacrificing public freedoms. Making vaccination compulsory means reducing the number of serious patients in intensive care, but it also mechanically increases the number of vaccinated people presenting side effects.
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