Xavier Cuny and Patrick Dalion

What are legal implications of outsourcing and subcontracting in French jurisprudence, which is changing significantly? Attention is drawn to the penal risks for heads of firms when rules are not respected that apply to work done in an establishment or plant by one or more outside companies. The means necessary for safely managing recourse to outside suppliers are pointed out. After discussing the legal grounds for obtaining outside services and their pertinence, attention shifts to the obligations of both heads of firms (the firm asking for outside interventions and the one providing services) and to the sanctions they risk. After the chemical plant explosion in Toulouse, new measures for regulating subcontracting were announced. Parliament is examining a bill of law on technological risks, a section of which concerns risks related to the growth of subcontracting operations in hazardous plants and sites. Existing measures are reviewed herein. The bill would tighten them in an effort to strengthen prevention.

The prices of life: The Fourth Rendez-Vous des Annales des Mines

The individual’s life is priceless but may also have a cost — when public decision-makers have to choose to pay more or less to save (or risk) lives, or when persons close to victims have to be compensated. In some case, as when making decisions about investments in transportation, the value of human life is mentioned outright. In others, as when dealing with health expenditures, we are wary of estimates. Why do reactions vary so much? What criteria underlie calculations? How legitimate are they? Marcel Boiteux, Claude Got and Guillaume Rosenwald tried to answer questions of this sort during the fourth meeting of the Rendez-Vous des Annales des Mines.

Laetitia Guérin-Schneider, Frédéric Bonnet and Lise Breuil

The Sapin Act of 29 January 1993 intended to clarify procedures whereby public authorities sign contracts and choose firms. It signaled a turning point in practices about “delegating” (outsourcing/leasing) public services in France, but not a turnabout. It instituted the obligation to advertise so as to promote competition, but without fundamentally altering the intuitu personae principle of direct negotiations between local authorities and firms. A legitimate question thus arises: can this reform measure up to expectations and actually change practices? To assess the Act’s impact in water management and purification, the GEA ( Gestion de l’Eau et de l’Assainissement, a laboratory at ENGREF) set up in 1998, with the backing of the Ministry of Ecology and water agencies, an observatory for following up on these “delegations”. After ten years of applying the law, the key points detected during the four years of observing procedures for renegotiating contracts are presented along with the prospects. This should provide material for debate about possible improvements in the way France subcontracts public services.
 

Access to nature, farm and forest land: an issue for people, communes and regions

Charlotte Michel and Laurent Mermet

How to make two apparently contradictory ways of appropriating space in nature compatible, namely: the exercise of ownership rights and free access for recreational purposes? How to avoid tensions, standoffs and obstructions; and organize harmonious cohabitation between various users? To answer these questions involving rural planning, the authors carried out research centered around Janville, France. This commune in the greater Paris area clearly illustrates the variety and mixture of issues in conflicts over access to nature. It also confirms that public access crystallizes issues in rural planning and land management around strategic places, such as roads, streams or woods. This case study shows that local authorities are gradually being involved in managing situations where access to privately owned land in nature is raising new problems. Till now, this sort of problem was merely a matter of de facto law. 

Michel Marchand

Accidental pollution of the seas is usually illustrated by the shipwreck of tankers carrying crude oil. We must look beyond this image since such accidents spill substances other than petrochemicals. We need but mention the Levoli Sun’s accident near the Cotentin peninsula, France, one year after the Erika went down. And what about spills of agricultural and food products? An accidental spill as apparently harmless as wheat might have serious effects on not just the environment but also human health. In all cases, two major series of questions crop up: 1) Is it necessary to intervene? If so, are we able to? And if we can, how to fight against spills? 2) What are the short- and long-term effects on the environment and on all human activities related to the sea (fishing, fish-farming, salt production, tourism, salt-water cures, etc.)? These two questions have a common denominator: the need to know how spilled products react. This knowledge conditions both the operational response for fighting against pollution and the assessment of the impact on the maritime environment.

The determination to act, the only way to make shipping safe soon

Jean Chapon

A few months after the Erika catastrophe, the Prestige has once again focused attention on unsafe traffic on the high seas. Had existing rules for elementary prudence in navigation or about the upkeep of ships been respected, these two shipwrecks and all other major catastrophes (not just those causing pollution) during recent decades would have been avoided or at least been on a much smaller scale. How to make parties in maritime transportation decide to apply the rules? Parliamentary committees have drafted important reports; the European Commission has adopted, and will adopt, useful measures; and we hope that the UN’s International Maritime Organization, which seems to have understood how urgent the problem is, will soon add new measures onto the ones that it has already (fortunately) taken. But making shipping safe requires, above all else, a genuine political determination to act.