The justice reform text notably increases the budget from 9.6 billion euros in 2023 to nearly 11 billion by 2027 and provides for massive hiring.
“I didn’t come to do bodybuilding, but it’s a historic reform”, estimates Éric Dupond-Moretti, Minister of Justice, on franceinfo Friday October 6, regarding the Draft orientation and programming law for the Ministry of Justice 2023-2027. The day before, Thursday, deputies and senators reached an agreement in the joint committee (CMP) ratifying most of the provisions, after its adoption this summer at first reading by both chambers.
The justice reform text notably increases the budget from 9.6 billion euros in 2023 to nearly 11 billion by 2027 and provides for massive hiring. “In terms of staff, it’s 1,500 more magistrates, it’s 1,800 more clerks. These are contract workers, whom we have called ‘attaches of justice’, who will arrive in the thousands in the courts”, welcomes the minister. The hiring of 600 prison integration and probation advisors, voted by the Senate, was however ruled out in the CMP. We should see the first effects “very quickly” according to him, “because we already have hiring planned and which will arrive in the jurisdictions in the coming months.”
The establishment of an “amicable policy”
For Éric Dupond-Moretti, the objectives are multiple: “to relieve the magistrates, the clerks of a workload which is important and then to repair 30 years of political, budgetary and human abandonment. But it is also, of course, to make justice more protective, these are the words of the President of the Republic, faster and closer to our compatriots”.
>> Recruitment of magistrates, new prison places… What the justice reform project presented by Eric Dupond-Moretti contains
Beyond financial and human resources, the Minister of Justice defends the implementation of an amicable policy, which in his eyes is “local justice”. “There are many litigants who listen to us, who have experienced civil trials which lasted well over two years. So we need to be able to drastically reduce all of that”he specifies.
He deplores “that today, in trials that touch on the intimate, sometimes the litigant does not see his judge. But how can you love justice if it is disembodied? There must be for the litigant the possibility of saying things and reclaiming one’s trial. And justice must decide quickly and amicably allows it. It is a justice which is much closer and it is a justice which of course allows us to go faster.”