Many French shopping centres to no longer require health pass

Shopping centres with a surface area of more than 20,000 square metres for which a health pass is mandatory will drop from 178 to 64, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire announced on BFM TV. 

The 64 shopping centres still concerned are located in nine departments where the incidence rate has remained above 200 per 100,000 inhabitants. 

This may be the end of the legal battle between retailers and prefectures, which had already led the courts to suspend the obligation to present the health pass in certain places based on the need to allow access to essential goods, services and transport.

With this new measure, the country’s top administrative court, the Council of State to look into the validity of some of these orders. 

“We will see on Wednesday whether the Council of State will retract this whole system which leads to ubiquitous situations,” tweeted the chairman of the strategic committee, Michel-Edouard Leclerc. (Mathieu Pollet | EURACTIV.fr)