Health pass: a Pyrrhic victory for the Walloon Region

Last November, the association had obtained, in summary proceedings before the Namur Court of First Instance, the suspension of the law validating the CST. The Walloon Region had appealed and was finally proved right by the Liège Court. The Court ruled that the association's application for annulment of the CST was “admissible but unfounded”.

According to the Region's lawyer, Maître Uyttendaele, the CST is “an indispensable instrument in the context of health policy, necessary, proportionate and even indispensable to guarantee the safety of citizens”. The Minister-President of the Region and his health minister “take note” of the judgment. The CST therefore remains in force in Wallonia “as long as the health situation requires it”.

A delicate precedent

The association Notre bon droit, for its part, notes that only the argument of non-proportionality was rejected. For the Court acknowledges that the Walloon decree violates the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Notre Bon Droit recalls the terms of the Court's judgment, namely that it is up to the Walloon Region to prove the proportionality of the CST. Thus, while the Court accepts that the Covid Safe Ticket may be considered “a proportionate and necessary measure at the time the judgment is delivered”, it nonetheless states that the Covid Safe Ticket is “a delicate precedent contrary, on the one hand, to the freedoms enshrined in international standards or our Constitution and, on the other hand, to a philosophy of non-social control. It also entails a risk of undermining medical confidentiality and respect for privacy”.

Notre bon droit goes on: this decision is “important in more than one respect”, because it “will serve as a precedent if the Covid Safe Ticket were to be turned into a vaccine pass”. The association indeed considers that “through its reasoning, the Court reminds the authorities of their responsibilities”: on the one hand, it reminds them “bluntly” that measures restricting freedoms “must always be subject to a proportionality review in the light of the evolution of the epidemiological situation”. On the other hand, this decision stresses that “such measures cannot be taken to make up for their shortcomings in terms of hospital capacity”.

By Thérèse Leblanc, journalist at BAM!