The death of little Renaud
The 9 defendants prosecuted before the Liège criminal court to answer for the drowning of little Renaud De Boeck were acquitted on Tuesday. Judge Lhoest found in his judgment that no wrongful behavior was attributable to the various defendants. (…) In her judgment, Judge Loest considered that, if negligence or wrongful behavior was observed in the organization and management of the swimming pool, they could not directly engage the responsibility of one or the other warned. The court also identified shortcomings in the investigation of the case and noted certain shortcomings in the organization of the pool and in the political management of this case. But no direct fault or negligence could be attributed to either of the defendants. “It is important to specify that all the actors in this case were sensitive to the horrible conditions in which little Renaud De Boeck died,” explained lawyers Franchimont and Dehousse. “But this decision is also a value judgment. Certain shortcomings in the organization and political management of the swimming pool are stigmatized by the court. This must be considered as a serious warning to state agents who must pay attention to the quality of their work.” As a reminder, Renaud De Boeck drowned on January 18, 2002 at the swimming pool of the Botanical Garden in Liège when his arm, stuck in a suction outlet located 75 centimeters deep, could not be freed in time. Initially, 9 people were referred to the Liège criminal court and prosecuted for acts of manslaughter due to lack of precaution and foresight. The 9 defendants were all civil servants involved in the management and maintenance of swimming pools in the Liège region. They were swimming pool engineers, team leaders, members of the technical staff of the City of Liège or engineers. None of them had witnessed the drowning. The heads of the school as well as the swimming instructors had all benefited from a dismissal of the case by the trial court and were no longer involved in the case.
Once again, the results delivered by the Justice of the jurists are illegible for the social body. Justice constructs its interpretation of reality with its principles, its reasoning, its values, in a dogmatic way and disconnected from the social environment. It is its own environment.
The problem is that the end result is not only often inequitable, but also expresses an outdated and erroneous vision of social reality. Thus in this case, the court used attribution reasoning aimed at attributing responsibility for a fault to each defendant taken individually. The death of little Renaud being the result of a failure of collective organization, this reasoning could obviously achieve no other result than the acquittal of the defendants. Except to express a modern point of view: there was indeed a Direction in this pool, a management, ultimately responsible for the quality of the organization. And if this Directorate did not exist, it was necessary to seek responsibilities at the municipal or political level.
But modernity is not unique to the justice system. It is time to dust it off, to simplify the language, to discern the social a priori under legal logic, to establish civic participation in the courts, not in the form of vague assessors subject to the prestige of professional judges, but of real, trained and active actors. In short, to bring justice to jurists to bring justice to citizens.
