Relying in particular on an expert’s report which pointed to an erroneous interpretation of the ultrasounds, the parents had initiated legal proceedings so that “special charges resulting from the disability of their child” be compensated.
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The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) condemned France, Thursday, February 3, for refusing to compensate the disability of a child who had not been diagnosed before birth. The child and his parents, who reside in Guadeloupe, “could legitimately hope to be able to obtain compensation for their loss corresponding to the costs of caring for their disabled child as soon as the damage occurred, namely (his) birth”, considers the court.
Their child, born in December 2001, is suffering from a set of malformations referred to as “Vacterl syndrome”. A diagnosis carried out a few months before his birth had however revealed no anomaly, explains the ECHR. Relying in particular on an expert’s report which pointed to an erroneous interpretation of the ultrasounds, the parents had initiated legal proceedings so that “special charges resulting from the disability of their child” be compensated.
At the end of a legal course of several years, they had been dismissed by the administrative justice, which had in particular invoked the provisions of the Kouchner law adopted in 2002. This law was passed in order to put an end to a case law allowing compensation for an undetected disability during pregnancy. The ECHR held that France should not have applied the Kouchner law retroactively in the case of this family from Guadeloupe, because it is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights.