Lhe deliberation delivered on December 8 by the Auch Criminal Court in the procedure initiated by the whistleblower Céline Boussié reactivates the debate on the protection of children with multiple disabilities in medico-educational institutes (IME), and more broadly that on launchers warning in the field of health.
As the judgments rendered in 2021 concerning whistleblowers show Irène Frachon, in the case of the Mediator, and Marine Martin, in that of the Dépakine, or today the case of Céline Boussié against the IME of Moussaron (Gers), number of alerts occur in the forensic field. And sometimes it takes up to ten years so that the citizens’ initiative results in a criminal judgment.
In the case of Céline Boussié, it is indeed from 2013 that she denounces the mistreatment suffered by eighty minors within the IME of Moussaron, intended to accommodate disabled children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities.
In ten years, this whistleblower was forced to defend herself against defamation proceedings (before being released by a decision of November 21, 2017), then to initiate unfair dismissal proceedings (finally giving her reason in appeal on July 24, 2020), before initiating criminal liability proceedings against his employer for moral harassment.
This last procedure, in which she did not win her case, ended on December 8, against the requisitions, with a general release in view of ” insufficiently characterized facts”.
“Dysfunctions”, “drifts”
Ten years is a long, very long time, on the scale of a career, or even a human life, especially when a correctional appeal is still possible. Ten years is enormous, but ultimately relative when you know that, twenty-five years earlier, in 1997, a report by the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (quoted in an article in the Monde of March 27, 2014) pointed the finger at this same establishment.
This report judged « opaque » his financial management, was surprised “malfunctions, even excesses, of an institutional, financial, accounting and medical nature”, and also noticed that “the heritage of the owners and managers of the establishment[était] maintained and embellished since 1971 ».
Symptomatic of the persistence of the failing functioning of certain IMEs, Céline Boussié’s alert certainly made it possible to denounce, once again, the mistreatment of disabled children, and obviously moved public opinion. But that did not prevent the tap of subsidies from continuing to flow, making these private establishments, subsidized with billions of euros by the State, a financial windfall for their owners.
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