The Strasbourg court rejected, on Friday, November 10, the requests for compensation from relatives of victims of nuclear tests carried out by France between 1960 and 1996 in Algeria and French Polynesia. The court found that the statute of limitations had passed.
The requests for compensation from relatives of people who died as a result of nuclear tests, carried out by France in Algeria and Polynesia between 1960 and 1996, were rejected, on Friday, November 10, 2023, by the administrative court of Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), according to AFP. Three widows and their children demanded recognition of their own damages after the death of a spouse suffering from cancer following exposure to ionizing radiation.
More than 1,700 compensation files filed
Since 2010, the Morin law has governed compensation for illnesses linked to nuclear tests. Between 2010 and 2020, 1,747 files were filed with the Nuclear Test Victims Compensation Committee (Civen). These requests are made either by sick people or by their beneficiaries in the event of death.
These families, whose appeal has just been rejected, had already obtained, as beneficiaries, compensation granted to their deceased loved ones, but not for their own damage. No provision is, in fact, provided for their loved ones for their moral, family, or material damage, recalls AFP.
The court justified its rejection by the statute of limitations. In his judgment, to which AFP had access, he recalls that the specific system of the 2010 law does not include the victims’ relatives. Consequently, he considers that it is the rules of common law of liability that must apply, with a limitation period of four years. The court set the starting point of the limitation period on the date of filing the first claim for compensation as beneficiaries.
The fight has only just begun”
“It’s an incomprehensible decision for the families, ” their lawyer, Me Cécile Labrunie, told AFP. For us, the starting point of the limitation period is the moment when these families finally obtained the offer of compensation as beneficiaries, and therefore recognition for their loved ones of the status of radiation victims. . » For the lawyer, “the fight has only just begun. There is a discussion about the starting point of the statute of limitations that we will appeal. The Ministry
of the Armed Forces will not always be able to hide behind questions of admissibility to absolve itself of its responsibility.”
Between 1966 and 1996, 193 nuclear tests were carried out in Polynesia from the then-uninhabited atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa. In total, “France carried out 210 nuclear tests in the Sahara and Polynesia between 1960 and 1996,” reports the website Vie Publique, and “170,000 inhabitants of Polynesia were exposed to radiation.”
