French Justice in the Streets

Thousands of lawyers and legal practitioners took to the streets of Paris and other major French cities this week.
French Justice in the Streets
3/10/2010
Updated:
3/10/2010
PARIS—Thousands of lawyers and legal practitioners took to the streets of Paris and other major French cities this week to protest against what they call the “destruction” of the French judicial system through governmental reforms. This level of mobilization in the judicial sector is unprecedented in France.

An estimated 3,000 attorneys, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, educators, and prison guards marched with banners from the Palais de Justice on Île de la Cité, one of the two islands on the Seine that are part of Paris, to the Chancellerie, where the core offices of France’s justice ministry are located. Hundreds more rallied in Marseille, Bordeaux, Nantes and Toulouse. The protests disrupted court proceedings in Paris, Lyon, and Brest where hearings had to be postponed.

The protesters say they are exhausted from the lack of financial resources for the judiciary and they oppose what they feel is pressure on them to “obey” political power.

Le Point newspaper reported that even during hearings, presiding judges openly supported the movement. During a court hearing at the Pontoise correctional tribunal related to the 1999 Concorde flight crash, the judge stated that he was “fully supportive of a movement denouncing the dangers facing justice.”

“We want means to perform our duties, we work for many extra hours without being paid for it,” protesting practitioners were reported as saying by Le Point. “We even have to buy our own pencils.”

There is concern about the introduction of a penal procedure reform that would allegedly “Americanize” the French system by getting rid of the examining magistrates, also known as investigating magistrates, whose job it is in the Napoleonic legal system to investigate cases and arrange prosecutions as independent judges.

Legal practitioners fear the reform will allow outside pressure—especially pressure coming from politically affairs—to diminish the independence of the judicial system, thus making possible the use of justice as a “tool for political power.”

In response to the protests, Michelle Alliot-Marie, France’s minister of Justice, issued a press statement asserting that the “modernization of our judicial system ... is, and will continue to be, done in close consultation with all judicial actors in the spirit of transparency and listening that has never been seen before in past reforms.”