2023-11-23 13:58:08
FRANCE – The government and its Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin tabled a bill in the Senate on November 15 aimed at “strengthening the fight against sectarian aberrations”. The text, presented to the Council of Ministers and composed of seven articles, devotes one of its five chapters to health. In its report, the government justifies this “development” by those who, “groups and individuals”, are not religious or spiritual gurus but “invest in the fields of health and well-being”. According to the Secretary of State, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache, it is “the emergence of discourse calling into question science and the credibility of health authorities” who is incriminated. A vague expression. The bill lumps “real” charlatans with health practitioners as long as they question a treatment. If the text is adopted, doctors “causing abandonment of medical treatment” risk up to three years of imprisonment and a fine of 45,000 euros.
The bill, available on the website of the Senate, sets out the government’s reasons. The document mentions a “significant increase in referrals to the interministerial mission of vigilance and fight against sectarian aberrations (Miviludes) in recent years”, particularly since the Covid pandemic, the management of which by the authorities has been strongly criticized. “Approximately 25% of the 4,020 referrals to Miviludes in 2021 concern health. In this area, unconventional care practices constitute 70% of referrals,” y lit-on.
Charlatans and health practitioners, the same thing?
In her press kit, Sabrina Agresti-Roubache explains that “sectarian abuses have evolved profoundly over many years”. According to her, these are no longer religious groups because other “groups or individuals are investing in the fields of health, food, well-being, but also personal development, coaching or training ”. She impute this increase in “sectarian deviations” from the health crisis, during which “discourses that exploit isolation and call into question science and the credibility of health authorities” have emerged.
Gérald Darmanin and his collaborators intend, through this new text, to strengthen the “About-Picard law” linked to the fight against sectarian abuses. What is it about ? In its chapter III, entitled “Protecting Health”, the bill states in its article 4 that “provocation to abandon or abstain is punishable by one year of imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 euros to follow therapeutic or prophylactic medical treatment, when this abandonment or abstention is presented as beneficial for the health of the persons concerned whereas it is, in the state of medical knowledge, clearly likely to result in them, taking into account the pathology they suffer from, serious consequences for their physical or psychological health”.
Sabrina Agresti-Roubache certainly mentioned “well-being coaches” as, for example, charlatans who sell miracle cures for cancer without having the slightest medical qualification. We might think that unqualified coaches or charlatans are the only target of the bill, but the rest of Chapter III says more. Article 5 mentions, in the event of conviction, the obligation of the public prosecutor to inform “without delay, in writing, the national professional orders mentioned in the fourth part of the Public Health Code of a conviction, even if not final. (…) pronounced against a person subject to these orders”. These are indeed health practitioners.
Freedom of expression, protected by Article 11 of the Declaration of 1789
The government report remove the doubt. We read that among the measures that could be provided by the bill: the continuation, “easily”, and the repression the promotion to the public, “often fragile, of practices falsely presented as beneficial for health when they are particularly dangerous for those who implement them.” Disciplinary, that is to say ordinal, sanctions against health professionals “who commit attacks against people linked to sectarian actions”, as unconventional medicine could be considered, will also be made easier.
Two days after the text was submitted to the Senate, the Council of State issued its opinion. We first note the remark of this high court that a repression of promotion “could call into question, by incriminating challenges to the current state of therapeutic practices, the freedom of scientific debates and the role of launchers of alert”. The provisions aimed at preventing the promotion of so-called “unconventional” care practices in the press, on the Internet and social networks, “constitute an attack on the exercise of freedom of expression, protected by article 11 of the Declaration of 1789”, continues the state Council.
Freedoms which are also protected by the European Court of Human Rights, we recall, especially since the Community Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms grants European citizens the freedom “ to accept or refuse a specific medical treatment, or to choose another type of treatment, which is essential to the control of one’s own destiny and to personal autonomy, in the absence of inappropriate pressures”.
Another remark from the Council of State: the facts incriminated by the bill, as well as provisions such as articles 4 and 5, are already covered by other texts. “The usefulness of supplementing these provisions with a new criminalization has not been established by the impact study and the information provided by the government.” With regard to health professionals, ordinal sanctions “also constitute means of regulating deviant exercise of these professions for which it has not been established that they lack effectiveness”.
The government’s report on the bill and its issues, namely “protecting health”, are already raising many questions and concerns among health practitioners about the exercise of their professions.
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