Lætitia Pascal has been a magistrate for 20 years. Non-unionized, she agreed to talk about her job for the first time. Judge in family cases at the court of Grasse (Alpes-Maritimes), she rules every day on cases of divorce or child custody.
Files twenty centimeters thick, of which she must analyze all the parts: she receives about twenty each week. “We’re still counting: I’ve done so much, I have so much left, if I do ten tomorrow, I might be okay, otherwise I’ll be working this weekend. We are afraid of having missed something, of having made a mistake, and the faster we work, the more likely we are to make a mistake.”
Decisions to be made at full speed, while the litigants wait months to go before the judge, even for some years. That morning, at the service of family affairs in Grasse, the hearings are timed. There are two judges to receive around thirty couples. Often, only lawyers can speak at the hearing. Lætitia Pascal admits that she does not always have time to hear from the parents: “we see them get up, and we see that they are frustrated, that they would have liked to tell us more things, to explain to us what they had on their minds, what they had been waiting to tell us for six months. But we haven’t been able to give enough time, we can’t. ”
France has 10.9 judges per 100,000 inhabitants, making it the fourth state with the least professional judges in the European Union. A comparison to be considered with caution, nuance the Chancellery, which explains that each judicial system is organized very differently.
There are 9,090 magistrates in France on January 1, 2021. The workforce has increased by 15% in fifteen years. Still insufficient for the unions, which evoke multiple sick leaves in the profession.
In Côte d’Or, Julie Lacour, magistrate for only four years, is just recovering from a hiatus of several months. She is giving herself up for the first time. “We want to give the maximum, but there is a moment when we forget ourselves completely, and we do not see it happening. You have physical aches and pains everywhere, you are more and more irritable, you find it difficult to keep your calm and you can not think anymore. It’s like having your brain heats up all the time, and all the ideas are intertwined. You can no longer make a decision, which was completely catastrophic in my function. ”
His doctor diagnosed him with burnout syndrome, or burnout. The Ministry of Justice does not count the sick leaves among magistrates, but Julie Lacour believes that her case is not isolated. “Since I spoke about it, I have a lot of colleagues who come to explain to me that they are at the end of the roll,” she laments.
“It’s very common, but colleagues don’t talk about it. It’s quite taboo.”
Julie Lacour, protection litigation judge in Montbard (Côte d’Or)to France 2
We have collected the written testimonies of two other magistrates who have been on sick leave for several years. “The institution tries to make me become another person (…) but I am not a machine to vomit judgments, ”Wrote one, when the other said to have felt like“a litigation crushing machine”. They evoke the “shame“, the “guilt”, A Justice which”has lost all meaning“.
Ministry of Justice
Evaluation report of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, 2020
“We no longer want a justice that does not listen and that times everything“, Le Monde, November 23, 2021
Non-exhaustive list.