Heritage of the Revolution of 1789, a brilliant symbol of participatory democracy in judicial matters, the popular jury of the Assize Court is in the process of extinction. Citizen participation in criminal justice is seriously threatened, called into question by a liberal doctrine which, placing on the judicial institution a market logic, gives itself the performance for the only horizon and the chronometer for single compass.
reached its climax, this dehumanizing approach, precisely denounced in the “3000 tribune” and whose deleterious effects have been skilfully exposed in Conclusive report of the Estates General of Justice , now attacks Democratic space allowing judges and citizens drawn to meet, debate, deliberate, and to do justice together “in the name of the French people”. In this hour when the confidence of the French in the judicial institution is weakened, this political choice, which would lead for citizens a major democratic dispossession and would dig more the gap with their justice, must be fiercely fought.
The problem arises in these terms: currently, the law provides that almost all crimes-that is to say the most serious offenses-are judged at first instance by an assize court composed of Three professional magistrates and six citizens drawn on the electoral lists. However, this will no longer be the case from the 1 er January 2023.
From this date, all the crimes punished for fifteen or twenty years of imprisonment – for example rapes, deadly violence, or tortures and acts of barbarism – will be judged by new jurisdictions called “criminal courses departmental “(CCD), the particularity of which is to be exclusively composed of professional magistrates (five in total). If jurors’ assize courses will continue to judge other crimes and calls, this reform will withdraw 57 % of the cases they knew until then. Today, around 20,000 citizens are called upon to sit on the assizes each year. Tomorrow, they will be less than 10,000. Sad decline!
Why such a democratic bleeding, even though the Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, claims to set himself for the objective of “ Make justice closer to our compatriots “? How to explain such a blatant contradiction between a discourse that promises the merger of justice and the people, and this reform which will accentuate their distance? In truth, the explanation is essentially managerial and budgetary.
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