This step was expected since the Parisian investigating judges of the Public Health Pole had announced at the end of March the closing of their investigations without having carried out indictments.
MO12345lemonde with AFP
The Paris prosecutor’s office requested a dismissal in the investigation into large-scale poisoning linked to the use of chlordecone in the French Antilles, he announced, Friday, November 25.
This step was expected since the Parisian investigation judges of the Public Health Pole had pronounced the end of their investigations at the end of March without having carried out indictments. Prohibited in mainland France in 1990, chlordecone remained authorized until 1993 in the Antilles, where he was suspected of having caused a wave of cancers.
In its final indictment dated Thursday, the prosecution considers that the facts are prescribed, in particular concerning poisoning, or not characterized, concerning the administration of harmful substance.
It is now up to the investigating judges to render their final decision in this very sensitive issue in Guadeloupe and Martinique, where more than 90 % of the adult population is contaminated by Chlordecone, according to Public Health France.
“A denial of justice”
The West Indian population also presents an incidence rate of prostate cancer among the highest in the world. And these cancers related to exposure to chlordecone were recognized as an occupational disease last December.
The survey had been opened in 2007 after the filing by several West Indian associations of a complaint for poisoning, endangering the life of others and administration of harmful substance.
In 2021, the investigating judges responsible for the file had expressed several civil parties of their analysis according to which the facts would be the vast majority prescribed.
The announcement of the end of investigations without any questioning had already raised an outcry at the end of March. “The turn that this scandalous business takes is worrying because we are moving towards a denial of justice,” had thus denounced the lawyers of the Martinican association for an urban ecology.