We must “open” the magistracy in terms of training and recruitment explains Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of the Committee of the States General of Justice, who delivers, in an interview with the “world”, his gaze on the State of justice and its challenges.
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No doubt better known to the general public for having chaired the independent committee on sexual abuse in the Church than for having been the highest official in the country at the head of the Council of State, Jean-Marc Sauvé was charged By the President of the Republic, on October 18, 2021, to chair the Committee of the States General of Justice. While he handed over to Emmanuel Macron on Friday, July 8, the conclusions of his work completed in April, he pleads to “massively provide the first body where collegiality, a guarantee of quality, has almost disappeared”. He warns the magistrates against “the illusion of believing that justice alone can preserve its office and guarantee its independence”.
You have chosen to titrate your report “to do justice to citizens”. How are they deprived of it?
In 1801, Jean-Etienne-Marie Portalis [the father of the Civil Code] had said, in his presentation report of the first civil code project, “justice is the first debt of sovereignty; it is to pay This sacred debt that the courts are established “. Justice is the case of the judges, naturally, but above all that of the sovereign, that is to say of the people. It is in the name of the French people that she is returned.
Now, we make the observation today of a double crisis. First of all that of the public service of justice. Dysfunctions are not paroxysmal, but deep. And then there is a broader crisis of the judicial authority that France shares, it seems to me, with almost all of the countries respecting the principles of the rule of law, including those which grant a place And a credit to their judges without common measure with French history.
You draw up the observation of justice whose deadlines are getting longer and whose quality of decisions drops, while the “flow entering “Do not increase. How do you explain it?
We see a slow but continuous and inexorable growth, stocks and time of judgment in civilian as in criminal, on appeal and, very clearly, at first instance. The quality of first instance judgments is increasingly questioned. The appeal rate of judgments of the high courts [now court courts] increased from just over 16 % in 2008 to 25 % in 2019. This reflects both dissatisfaction with litigants and an increasing dispute of decisions of the judicial authority. More than 46 % of these judgments are totally or partially informed on appeal. So set up the idea that the first instance is “a heating round”. The extension of deadlines is also explained by the growing complexity of affairs, while some of the simplest disputes have been dressed up.
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