Dtwo judgments of the administrative court of Paris, on June 24 and 28, recognize faults of the State. In one case, the court affirms the illegality of the derogatory reauthorization of chlordecone in the West Indies. In the other case, the court considers that the change in doctrine on the storage of masks, made upstream of the Covid-19 pandemic to the detriment of health imperatives, was faulty, and that the erroneous communication on the (in) usefulness of wearing a mask, at the start of a crisis, was just as important.
Each time, the public decision was driven by economic considerations: prevalence of the interests of banana manufacturers, concern to reduce the cost of storing masks. Certainly, by these two decisions, the judge does not condemn the State, other conditions of this legal action being lacking. However, for those who do not want to relegate these judgments to jurisprudential oblivion, the recognition of these faults has the advantage of highlighting the failures of the public authorities.
Beyond these two recent cases, real condemnations have been pronounced against the State, declared responsible for the inadequacy of its policy to fight against global warming, the ineffectiveness of the enforceable right to housing, the indignity of the conditions of detention in certain French prisons, the lack of schooling for disabled children or the inappropriate follow-up of autistic people… Legal actions of the same register are pending concerning teachers not replaced or the regulation of pesticides .
Risky calculation
It is up to the administrative judge to condemn the State for all these breaches. It is true that such decisions do not designate faulty individuals: the responsibility of the public authorities is not made to prosecute agents or decision-makers, but to point out institutional dysfunctions. Therefore, only the activity of an abstract entity is stigmatized.
Moreover, when it is granted to the victim, the compensation (moreover, too often modest) weighs on the public budget, and therefore on the taxpayers. We can then consider that the State always gets off lightly. Only at fault but not responsible, he is not likely to modify his conduct. Even at fault and responsible, it costs him less to integrate the compensatory burden of convictions into its operating costs than to reform its way of administering. Such a calculation, arithmetically exact, is however risky.
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