Against “discount justice”, magistrates, lawyers and clerks mobilize year after column

Gatherings must be held during the day to say the fed up of a profession which remains, according to the unions of magistrates, confronted with a “titanic workload”.

by MO12345lemonde with AFP (with AFP)

A year after a resounding gallery which had spread out their “suffering” at work, magistrates, lawyers and clerks are called upon to mobilize Tuesday, November 22 against “discount justice”. “The reality on the ground is always overloaded audiences (…), deadlines beyond reason, unplanned judgments”, write nineteen unions and organizations of magistrates, lawyers or integration advisers in A joint press release, calling for “returning all audiences” Tuesday.

Reduction must take place during the day, especially in Paris before the judicial court at 12 noon, to say the fed up of a profession which remains, according to the magistrates unions, confronted with a “charge of titanic work “.

Just a year ago, the gallery signed by 3,000 of them in MO12345lemonde had created an electroshock and alerted to the working conditions of an institution plagued by a “serious loss of meaning”. Written after the suicide of a young colleague, the text has today been initialed by nearly 8,000 magistrates, justice auditors and clerks.

The 3,000 tribune “enabled many actions to be started,” said the Chancellery. Launched by the Government, the consultations of the States General of Justice reinforced this diagnosis, by concluding that “the state of advanced dilapidation” of the institution, to which the ministry tried to respond, for 2023, a third increase Successive of 8 % of its annual budget.

“With this budget of almost 10 billion euros, the Ministry of Justice continues its change of dimension with means up to its missions,” said the Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond at the end of September -Moretti, which must soon reveal a new action plan. The executive also committed to recruiting 8,500 additional magistrates and justice staff by the end of the second Macron five -year period and announced an increase in wages of 1,000 euros monthly on average for judicial judges.

The account is not there, however, according to professional organizations. “If recruitments of magistrates and registry officials are planned for 2023, they are largely insufficient and no clear action plan has been defined, as the urgency of the situation would nevertheless require,” they write in Their common press release.

France still late compared to its neighbors

According to the Council of Europe, France continues to allocate fewer credits to justice than its European partners with comparable GDP: it devoted 72.50 euros per inhabitant in 2020, against 82.20 euros In Italy, 88 in Spain or 140.70 in Germany.

According to the unions, justice professionals remain “in the grip of a loss of meaning”, while the litigants are “reduced to the state of” files “and” stocks “”. “There is a professional exhaustion of magistrates who work in the evening and the weekend, to whom it is said that they must better organize, less motivate their decisions, less make the audiences last,” says Cécile Mamelin, ‘Union union of magistrates (USM, majority).

In December 2021, magistrates and clerks had already taken up the street to say the “despair” of those who do justice on a daily basis; A feeling relayed at the top of the judicial hierarchy, several representatives of which had then mobilized.

More recently, in mid-October, the death of a 44-year-old magistrate, Marie Truchet, in the middle of an immediate appearance in Nanterre caused a new shock wave. A minute of silence was observed in several jurisdictions and the USM noted the “particularly difficult” working conditions in Nanterre.

Thursday, this court received the visit, extremely rare, and the support of the two highest French magistrates, the first president of the Court of Cassation, Christophe Soulard, and the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation, François Molins. “The observation of the suffering of the judicial world is no longer taboo,” assured the agency France-Presse Mr. Molins. “We talk about it at all judicial levels. But beyond this observation, are there things that advance?”

/Media reports cited above.