It was three months ago, in November 2021: the cry of alarm – through a tribune in the newspaper The world – 3000 magistrates worn out and worried about the quality of their work. They are now 9000 to have initialed it. Pressed to act, the Ministry of Justice has accelerated its vast project to assess the workload of magistrates.
Without waiting, the National Conference of Court Presidents revealed its own calculations on February 16 and estimated that 35% more judges would be needed for the courts to function normally, i.e. the urgent need for 1,500 additional judges. Unaccustomed to mobilization, the profession is still trying to find means of action in recent weeks to keep up the pressure.
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Here and there, magistrates thus decide to no longer perform certain tasks. Administration and statistics are, for example, sacrificed. But audiences are too.
“Like emergency physicians who sometimes have to sort out patients, we too have to sort out files.”
Jerome Forstat franceinfo
“This results in referrals from hearings, for example traffic offences, because we choose to ensure emergencies in family matters. Delete from the penal because we choose to focus on minors in danger. We no longer have a choice!” denounces Jerôme Forst, judge in Pau where four judges have been missing for months.
In Nanterre and Lille, the magistrates voted lists of tasks that the jurisdiction is forced to abandon. A mode of action inspired by prison guards who sometimes claim an “impossibility to do”. In several courts, the judges have also decreed the end of the hearings beyond 9 p.m.
“For a long time, the magistrates considered that there was a kind of honor in sacrificing oneself. This is no longer possibleaccording to Maximin Sanson, magistrate in Bobigny. It is not so much the magistrates who are mistreated by judging at morning hours, it is the litigant himself, it is the victim. Everyone is waiting. The last time, a victim of domestic violence had a child who was sleeping on a bench. She passed almost at midnight. These are things we no longer wanted to see. It’s completely grotesque.”
Two unions and two associations of magistrates filed a complaint against France with the European Union at the beginning of February 2022 to denounce the “permanent violation of working time rules in their profession.”