The dogs that accompany certain minor victims during legal proceedings will be “generalised”.
The objective is “one
(animal)
per department”, announced this Tuesday the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti.
“Child victims, when the time comes to tell what they have suffered, it is obviously a moment of anguish.
This living cuddly toy is there to help the child to verbalize, to feel less bad, ”explained the Keeper of the Seals.
Ten dogs of this type already exist in France.
Their role was highlighted during the trial last September in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône) of the driver of a school bus who had collided with a train in Millas (Pyrénées-Orientales).
Six children were dead and 17 were injured.
"I want to generalize this practice," said the minister, who discovered it when he was still a lawyer.
An experiment was set up in 2019 by Frédéric Almendros, then prosecutor of Cahors (Lot), on the model of a practice developed in the United States but pioneering in Europe.
The Keeper of the Seals must go this Tuesday afternoon in the company of Brigitte Macron, the wife of the President of the Republic, to the judicial court of Orléans (Loiret), where two legal assistance dogs are already involved.
He must announce the signing of an agreement between the ministry, the association Handi'Chiens, which trains these animals, the Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA), which will call on its volunteers to accommodate them, and France Victimes.
The same animal from the beginning to the end of the procedure
Training a dog costs around 17,000 euros, according to Handi'Chiens, a cost that will be shared between the association and the ministry.
The idea is that the same animal "follows the child from the beginning" of the procedure until "the end" during a possible trial, passing through the office of the examining magistrate, underlined Eric Dupond-Moretti .
The dogs will be present from the Pediatric Reception and Listening Units (Uaped), structures that bring together doctors, psychologists and investigators to hear children in a secure setting and prevent them from repeating their testimony at each stage of the procedure.
The government announced in September that it wanted to provide each department with one of these units at the start of 2024. “35 opened in 2022 and 60 more are planned”, specified the Keeper of the Seals.
Eric Dupond-Moretti also wants to “generalize as quickly as possible” the practice of “showing the child the courtroom where he will testify”.
He will soon publish "a circular" to encourage this initiative, which already exists in some courts such as Bourges (Cher), in partnership with associations such as France Victims.
Sexual violence affects 160,000 minors each year, according to the report published in September by the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children (Ciivise).