a struggling judicial system, the agony of magistrates

The files are piling up, the deadlines are lengthening, penalizing the litigants and despairing the magistrates, exhausted. At the Nantes courthouse (Loire Atlantique), Thibaut Lepine, a family affairs judge, does a lot of hard work to mop up his pile of cases. But despite a formidable efficiency, he and his team are falling behind: “We cannot do more, we are at the maximum. You can’t help but experience it as a personal failure. We tell ourselves that the job we want to do, we have not done as well as it should have been.” And even report files at home to work in the evening are not enough to make up for this delay.

Symbol of this embolism: a dedicated room where 230 cases sleep, ready to be judged. And these are serious issues: sexual assault, violence against minors, particularly complex scams … And for lack of magistrates, these files, opened in 2015, still do not have a trial date. Arnaud Baron, coordinating magistrate at theaudaciously, regrets having to make choices: “We are the arbiter of pain, it’s something unbearable.“ Good aware of the problem, these heads of jurisdiction have made it a priority and ask the state additional magistrates. Without success.