“Desperate”, the magistrates of the judicial court of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine) seize the Council of State to obtain the suspension of the text which allocates the posts in the jurisdictions of the country.
To present this "unprecedented" action, which aims to "force Éric Dupond-Moretti", the Minister of Justice, to "explain" and "obtain reinforcements", they hold a press conference this Tuesday morning.
Concretely, 80 magistrates of the court met in association to seize the highest jurisdiction of an “appeal for abuse of power” motivated by a “manifest error of assessment”.
The text, last June, "the job location circular", "scandalously unsuitable", according to the association, allocates 109 judge posts, one more than last year, and 37 to the prosecution, one more as well as last year (not counting the cold cases division, currently made up of three investigating judges and two public prosecutors).
When Paris, Bobigny, Marseille and Lyon see their number of judges increase from 8 to 20 staff depending on the case.
Family court judges “engulfed”
For the association, the administration's error of assessment is not to take into account the specificities of the Nanterre court, where the "pecuniary stakes" are "out of the ordinary".
Between the headquarters of 12 CAC 40 companies, the giants of finance, the media, the pharmaceutical industry in particular, the disputes are enormous.
This is reflected in the congestion of the construction chamber, where cases related to the construction sites of Greater Paris and the Olympic Games are dealt with, criminal labor law, where work accidents involving the plethora of construction sites in the department and concealed work.
In support of their approach, the magistrates list everything that is dysfunctional: from the industrial tribunal, where it takes up to four years to obtain a decision, to the family division where the judges are "engulfed" under 20% of divorces with assets that sometimes amount to hundreds of millions of euros through the chamber of intra-family and sexual violence where three out of ten cases are systematically returned a year later.
If the anger is even more intense since the death of Marie Truchet, the magistrates of Nanterre considered this action before the Council of State a few months before the tragic disappearance of their colleague.
Moreover, the latter had participated in the foundation of the association.