PARIS — The Versailles administrative court has suspended a local mandate requiring people to present a health pass, which shows proof of a complete vaccination course or a negative COVID-19 test result, to access shopping centers, the AFP reported.
The requirement had come into effect on Monday for the Yvelines department, an area bordering Paris on the west. It had been put in place after the French government requested that local authorities impose checks on health passes for retail spaces larger than 20,000 square meters when cases rose above 200 per 100,000 inhabitants. Initially, such retail spaces had been excluded from mandatory health pass checks.
The court considered that the requirement to present a health pass was applied without offering solutions to give adequate access to first necessity goods and services to those who did not have the health pass.
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Contacted by the Agence France-Presse, the prefecture commented it had taken into account all stores available within a living area, not only those available in shopping centers. It is examining if it would appeal the decision.
Retail federations welcomed this decision, having decried the health pass mandate as too vague and going against the advice of France’s constitutional court to give consumers a wide range of retail options.
This comes as another prefecture in the North of France announced a last-minute cancelation of a similar requirement at the end of last week, provoking anger and dismay among retail professionals who had hired extra personnel to carry out access control and checks.