Historic AIDS Court Case Opens in France

Sylvie Rouy, a mother of two who has AIDS and must use a wheelchair, came Tuesday seeking justice. But in pain and fatigued, she had to be whisked by ambulance from the courtroom to a hospital for injections of morphine and cortisone.

“This trial has destroyed me, has destroyed my family, my child,” said the tearful 35-year-old woman from Lorraine in eastern France. “The ministers knew as early as 1983--they knew, but they chose to favor French industry, the prestige of France, and they let human beings be killed. That I cannot forgive.”

Tuesday morning, in a building near the Arc de Triomphe usually used for diplomatic gatherings, a trial unparalleled in the annals of postwar France began. A former prime minister, Laurent Fabius, and two members of his 1984-86 government are charged with manslaughter--while in office they allegedly worried more about commerce than the risks of the then-mysterious phenomenon called AIDS.

The former Socialist officials, whose political careers have been damaged or ruined because of the scandal, are specifically on trial because blood and blood-based products contaminated with the AIDS virus were transfused into seven people in 1985. Five are now dead, including a baby who was born HIV-positive.

In 1985, according to the prosecution, the government headed by Fabius delayed requiring mandatory AIDS testing of donated blood so France’s Pasteur Institute could develop a rival to the test marketed by Abbott Laboratories, a U.S. firm.

On Tuesday, living victims and relatives of the deceased were given 40 minutes to state their case as the trial began.

“I have waited for years and years to speak to you, but now I fear I will not be able to say it all,” Agnes Cochin, 50, a pharmacist whose 5 1/2-year-old son died of AIDS complications after a transfusion in May 1985, told the accused, her voice thick with emotion.

“You condemned 4,500 people to death. Are you aware of this?” the grieving mother said.

The Court of Justice of the Republic, created in 1993 to judge ministers for crimes allegedly committed while in office, is meeting for the first time to try Fabius, former Secretary of State for Health Edmond Herve and Georgina Dufoix, who was minister for social services. It is not an ordinary court, but a tribunal made up of a dozen members of Parliament and three magistrates. If found guilty, the defendants could be sentenced to five years in prison.

Some worry that the special court is forcing the pendulum too far the other way. “In this country, we can no longer decide anything without pinning the responsibility on someone: mayors, prefects, ministers,” said Jean-Rene Farthoat, a prominent Paris lawyer.

The accused steadfastly maintain their innocence, contending that they acted on the best but ultimately erroneous scientific data of the time. The link between infected blood and transmission of the disease, they say, wasn’t yet definite.

Victims and relatives of those who died are worried about the impartiality of the proceedings. Sitting in judgment of the well-connected Fabius, 52, who now is speaker of the lower house of France’s Parliament, is a tribunal in which fellow lawmakers are in the majority.

“This is partisan justice. You are being judged by your friends and colleagues,” Yves Aupic, 40, an AIDS patient who now needs crutches to walk, told the defendants, who sat solemn-faced at separate desks. Aupic refused to be cross-examined at what he termed a legal sham.

“Since the beginning of this business, we’ve been shunted completely to the sidelines,” Rouy said after being wheeled out of the court by her husband on the way to the hospital. A former prison guard, she developed AIDS after delivering her first son Aug. 2, 1985. She was anemic, and her doctor ordered a transfusion.

“My son says he’s guilty, that if he hadn’t been born that day, I wouldn’t be contaminated,” Rouy said. “It’s other men, those who today are in the dock, who are responsible. They must pay.”