The contaminated blood scandal was a public health, political, and financial scandal resulting from the presence of HIV, the AIDS virus, in the blood of people who had received blood transfusions. This tragic contamination dominated public discourse in France during the 1980s and 1990s and led to criminal prosecutions—something that was rarely the case elsewhere.
From a criminal law perspective, there were three distinct aspects. The first involved the director of the National Blood Transfusion Center, who was sentenced in 1992 to four years in prison. The second involved politicians. And the third aspect involved individuals who had escaped the initial prosecutions. The law firm represented the physician who invented the technique of heating blood to destroy the virus, who was accused of failing to report his discovery early enough. This third aspect concluded on July 4, 2002, with a general dismissal of the charges, which was upheld by the Court of Cassation.
The scandal, which began in 1982 with the first victims of the virus, came to a definitive end 20 years later. The contaminated blood scandal sparked a political and constitutional crisis because, prior to the 1993 reform, the Constitution made it virtually impossible to prosecute ministers. Ministers, notably Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, were hounded by the opposition and constantly accused of mismanagement, lack of foresight, and ultimately, involuntary manslaughter.
To resolve the crisis, a court ruling was needed—with the risk of a conviction that would obviously have ended the careers of all the ministers involved— but also the risk of an acquittal, which would ultimately close the case and put an end to the accusations. This is why President François Mitterrand decided to reform the Constitution in order to create a court with jurisdiction to try ministers, and, in the process, to update the 1958 text, which had become outdated in certain respects.
In 1992–93, the Vedel Commission(1)—to which Daniel Soulez Larivière was appointed—was tasked with devising a constitutional solution to allow for the prosecution of ministers. The commission set to work by creating—as was the idea at the time—a special court, the Court of Justice of the Republic, this time staffed by lawmakers in judicial robes, forming a sort of jury of professional politicians. When the case came before it, the Court of Justice of the Republic acquitted Laurent Fabius, then Prime Minister, and Georgina Dufoix, former Minister of Social Affairs and Solidarity, in 1999, while Edmond Hervé, former Minister of Health, was convicted but had his sentence suspended.
Due to the very nature of this court—which was convening for the first time—as well as its disastrous implementation, the contaminated blood trial was a fiasco that led Dean Vedel to remark that he had “misjudged the situation, but he wasn’t alone”—an opinion shared by Maître Soulez Larivière and Olivier Duhamel. The Court of Justice of the Republic will likely be abolished soon, as this case demonstrated that the blending of justice and politics does not really work.
That is why, ten years later, the Avril Commission—tasked with establishing a new criminal status for the President of the Republic—erected a temporary, impenetrable wall between the President and the courts in order to completely separate the judicial from the political spheres, a solution championed by Guy Carcassonne and Daniel Soulez Larivière, who worked in tandem on this issue. The lesson from this case remains the same: when passion and emotion become entangled with legal and judicial matters, the results are not good.