Ex-Premier Is Being Tried in Deaths Linked to HIV Scandal

Next week, the curtain will rise on a spectacle without precedent in French history: a former prime minister on trial for involuntary manslaughter.

It is a day Edmond-Luc Henry, 49, and other hemophiliacs in France who carry the AIDS virus have awaited for more than a decade.

Once the wunderkind of the Socialist Party, Laurent Fabius, 52--or someone else in the government that he headed from 1984 to 1986--blocked the sale of an AIDS virus detection test manufactured by Abbott Laboratories, an American firm, so that a French competitor wouldn’t be shut out of the market.

That was on May 9, 1985. On Aug. 1 of that year, after the French laboratory Diagnostics Pasteur had put the final touches on its own test, the Fabius government decided to require testing of all donated blood for AIDS. By then, however, hundreds of hemophiliacs and people receiving transfusions had been given blood or blood products contaminated with the AIDS virus.

“They [Fabius and his subordinates] gave priority to economic and industrial interests to the detriment of public health,” charges Henry, who is president of the French Assn. of Hemophiliacs and contracted the virus, known as HIV, in 1984.

Of France’s 2,500 hemophiliacs, who need doses of a blood-based extract to supply clotting agents they lack naturally, an estimated 1,300 developed HIV through blood products supplied by carriers of the virus. More than a quarter of the victims, it is estimated, were infected in 1985. The Fabius government was blocking sale of the Abbott test during part of 1985. Out of all the infected hemophiliacs, 600 have died.

In March 1988, the first complaints were filed in what quickly grew into the greatest public health scandal in French history.

In 1992, four senior public health officials, including the director of the national blood transfusion center, were convicted of knowingly allowing tainted blood to be given to hemophiliacs. They were sentenced to jail terms of as long as four years.

Starting Tuesday, the Court of Justice of the Republic, created in 1993 to judge Cabinet ministers for their actions in office, will begin sitting for the first time to determine how much responsibility, if any, belongs to Fabius.

Also on trial are Fabius’ former social affairs minister, Georgina Dufoix, and Edmond Herve, his secretary of state for health.

The special court is made up of three professional magistrates and 12 legislators. Among the lawmakers, conservatives predominate, but there is sympathy for Fabius across the political spectrum.

His defenders contend that Fabius, now speaker of the National Assembly, wasn’t personally responsible for the decision to block the Abbott test. They argue that he is being attacked on the basis of scientific knowledge that wasn’t clear or widely available in 1985.

“At the time, there were 350 AIDS cases in France, and only eight that had been caused by blood transfusions,” said Sylvie Vormus, a Fabius spokeswoman. “The link between AIDS and blood wasn’t well established.”

The former prime minister and his two colleagues are formally accused in the deaths of seven people who received blood containing HIV.

“Monsieur Fabius, as a former prime minister, has powerful networks and can make them work for him,” said Henry, the president of the hemophiliacs association. “We can’t fight these networks. But I have confidence in the judges.”

Fabius has said he welcomes the trial because it gives him the chance to clear his name.

“I will confront this trial with compassion in my heart for those who have suffered so much,” he said Wednesday. “In my conscience, I have the feeling of having acted as I ought to have.”