Charges Dismissed in French AIDS Case

By VERENA VON DERSCHAU : Associated Press Writer
Jun 18, 2003 : 9:34 pm ET

PARIS -- France's highest court on Wednesday threw out cases against 30 medics accused of giving patients AIDS-tainted blood, a decade-old scandal that shook the public health establishment.

More than 4,000 people, mainly hemophiliacs, were infected by blood products tainted with the HIV virus. Several hundred have died.

The 30 defendants had been charged with poisoning or complicity in poisoning and involuntary homicide or injury.

In its ruling, the court determined that doctors who prescribed tainted blood products before 1985 could not be accused of poisoning because they did not have "knowledge of the necessarily deadly character" of the products, which came from the state-run National Center for Blood Transfusions.

Victims and their families immediately protested the decision.

"Cowards!" shouted the mother of Yves Bertran-Miret, a hemophiliac who contracted AIDS from tainted blood products. "It's shameful. French justice is rotten."

The court also ruled that a crime can only be characterized as a poisoning if the person in question "acted with the intention to kill."

As for involuntary homicide and injury, the court ruled that the "initial contamination" occurred before U.S. and French AIDS tests were available and before the state-run National Blood Transfusion Center "to continue to distribute infected lots."

In a 1999 ruling in the scandal, a special court acquitted former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius and Social Affairs Minister Georgina Dufoix on charges of manslaughter. Former Health Minister Edmond Herve was convicted but never punished in what was the most spectacular of three trials over the tainted blood scandal.