Proposition 50K2133

Projet de loi relatif aux examens médicaux dans le cadre des relations de travail.

General information ¶

Submitted by

The Senate

Submission date

July 14, 1999

Official page

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Status

Adopted

Requirement

Simple

Subjects

work occupational medicine

Contact form ¶

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Discussion ¶

Dec. 17, 2002 | Plenary session (Chamber of representatives)

Full source

Mr. Speaker, given the privacy of our assembly, I will be very brief and will limit myself to giving a few words of presentation. First, this is a draft that comes to us from the Senate, where it was unanimously adopted. It prohibits medical tests to detect certain aspects of the health of workers. The bill regulates this provision. It allows the government to make arrangements to allow certain exceptions. The whole proposal was unanimously approved by the committee. It contains 16 articles. I think, Mrs. Minister, I have summarized very briefly the project that is submitted to us.

Ms Cahay is included in the general discussion. This project is of no importance, you know. They are all important but I have read this one and there is no shortage of importance. I say this for the Chamber, as long as it remembers it. All this goes so unanimously and somewhat innocently, but that’s not bad.

There is unanimity on many projects.

Yes, this proves it for one and for the other, Madame.

Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Deputy Prime Minister, dear colleagues, you will say that this is a day when I occupy a lot of the tribune. Those are the circumstances, Mr. Minister. We have worked seriously in the committee and these two projects we are now considering are very important and were approved unanimously, which proves that they were well depleted at first and that the committee could only approve what was well prepared.

I now come back to the subject of this project. It concerns medical examinations within the framework of employment relations. This project, which is presented to us today, has the merit of clearly designating the prohibited practices, of guaranteeing the rights of workers by entrusting all medical examinations to the labor doctor and of opening a possibility of recourse to candidates who were ⁇ lacking them. We reject any discrimination against genetically disadvantaged persons. It is indeed inconceivable to use genetic information for discriminatory purposes in various life settings and in particular during an employment exam. The bill is in line with the European Convention on Biomedicine, which prohibits all forms of discrimination, opinions on genetic heritage and authorizes predictive genetic testing only for medical or research purposes. by

The explanatory report states that conducting predictive tests for a purpose other than health would entail a disproportionate infringement on individual rights and respect for privacy. The use of genetic testing for prediction and selection purposes, as part of recruitment procedures and the medical follow-up of workers, raises many ethical questions. Does the detected risk relate well to the job? Is the confidentiality of the results guaranteed? Is it possible to exclude a potential patient from a job?

The tests we have today allow us to search for only a very limited number of predispositions. Furthermore, we are not able to reliably assess individual susceptibility to occupational diseases determined using genetic testing. Even from a scientific point of view, it is therefore not reasonable to exclude a candidate for employment on this basis.

To date, no Belgian legal provision prohibited employers from using such genetic tests either during hiring or during the execution of the contract. The General Labour Regulations do not expressly permit or prohibit the use of such tests. Thanks to the growing knowledge of the human genome and the rapid development of genetic technology, the risk of certain health problems can be identified with greater accuracy, as well as the identification of people with a greater susceptibility to work-related conditions. These conditions could therefore be used to systematically exclude workers with a disadvantaged variant of a given gene and not to protect them.

It is therefore important, under the guise of better protection of the health of workers, to avoid leading to a logic of exclusion of genetically disadvantaged persons. This is why, Mr. President, Mrs. Deputy Prime Minister, Dear colleagues, the Reform Movement Group will support this bill.

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to add that, as you said, this project has a very important dimension for all workers and for the future. I think the press should in any case make an important echo of what will be discussed at us today.

It should also be emphasized – since we are talking about gender equality in society – that the bill will prevent testing to select gender. It is also an achievement for the entire society.