Eric Dupond-Moretti, March 2, 2021. -

Jacques Witt / SIPA

Hearings filmed, elimination of credits for automatic reduction of sentence, supervision of preliminary investigations… In an interview with

Le

Point

, the Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti unveils this Tuesday the outline of a large bill to reform the justice system.

“The purpose of this law is to restore the confidence of our fellow citizens in justice.

This will probably be his name: "Law for confidence in the judicial institution", says Eric Dupond-Moretti.

The minister wishes to present his text to the Council of Ministers "in mid-April", before a review in Parliament a month later, his entourage confirmed to AFP.

The text is still "being written", according to the same source.

Open the trial rooms to cameras

Among the measures envisaged, the Minister intends to "put an end to the credits for automatic remission of sentence (...) put in place at the beginning of the 2000s with the sole aim of regulating the penal population, without saying so".

"What I want is to put an end to the hypocrisy and put virtue back into the system: reductions in sentences, yes, if they benefit society, the staff and the inmate himself, who will have to do , to benefit from it, the necessary reintegration efforts ”, he explains.

Another measure, already touched on, the Minister of Justice wishes to "open the hearings to the cameras" to "do the work of pedagogy" and no longer "only film the trials for History".

“It is not a question of pouring into the trash, the sensationalism.

The idea is to take the citizens who so wish by the hand to lead them into the room where the trials are taking place and show them how it works, ”he underlines.

The recordings, authorized by the Chancellery, would then be broadcast "on television, mainly".

The limited preliminary investigation

As announced when he took office in July, the minister also wants to frame the preliminary investigation by limiting it to "two years maximum, with a possible extension of one year after a motivated agreement from the prosecutor", and by opening it "to the contradictory ”.

Eric Dupond-Moretti defends himself in

Le Point

for having been "inspired" for this proposal from the controversial preliminary investigation initiated by the National Financial Prosecutor's Office (PNF) to identify, in vain, on the telephone records of lawyers the mole who had warned Nicolas Sarkozy that he was tapped.

The former president was sentenced Monday in this case to one year in prison.

Targeted by the PNF investigation, Eric Dupond-Moretti, still a lawyer, filed a complaint before withdrawing it the evening of his entry into the government.

He then, as minister, ordered an administrative investigation against three PNF magistrates.

This decision is worth to him to be himself targeted by an investigation for “illegal taking of interests”.

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Eric Dupond-Moretti presents this Monday his avenues for reforming the school of the judiciary

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