Denouncing their "suffering" at work and their "despair", magistrates and clerks gathered Wednesday, December 15 all over France alongside lawyers to demand "dignified" means for justice, while unease grows within the courts.
This "general mobilization for justice", at the call of 17 organizations, was massively followed, three weeks after the explosion of a platform crying the exhaustion and the loss of meaning of those who deliver justice on a daily basis.
From Bastia to Rennes, from Lyon to Montpellier, black and red dresses brandished signs proclaiming "I am ashamed of my justice", "To judge my heart has stopped" or "Justice sick", a keyword under which magistrates and clerks testify about their working conditions on social networks.
In Paris, several hundred magistrates, clerks and lawyers - 650 according to the Prefecture of Police - gathered at midday in front of the Ministry of the Economy, asking: "And where are they, and where are they recruiting? "
A delegation from the inter-union was to be received by the office of the Minister of Public Accounts.
"We will have to invent other means to deliver justice because justice can no longer", launched the president of the USM, Céline Parisot.
"We have never seen such a mobilization, a unanimity in the observation of a dehumanized justice", added Katia Dubreuil, president of the Syndicate of the magistrature (SM), for whom this day is "a first step".
"Slaughter" policy
The two main magistrates' unions have filed strike notices - "a first" for the majority USM - which has resulted in the dismissal of many hearings, apart from emergencies.
The Department of Justice was unable to quantify them at the end of the afternoon.
In Nantes, the deputy public prosecutor Yvon Ollivier denounced a policy of "slaughter".
"We are working faster and faster, but behind the cases, there are people who need to be judged correctly."
This rare movement of anger brought together several hundred professionals in Bordeaux, around 400 in Marseille, 300 in Lyon, 230 to 400 in Strasbourg, 200 in Rennes, a hundred in Nice, Besançon, Grenoble and Chambéry, a few dozen also in Orléans, Dijon or Bastia.
"For years, we have been in pain. We are working exponential hours, we can no longer take it. Last night, a colleague stayed at the palace until 2:30 in the morning and this morning he was at his post at 8 h 30 ", said Céline, clerk at the Nice juvenile court.
In Strasbourg, "there are 74 vacant registry staff posts, out of 270, that's more than a quarter," said another clerk, Caroline Barthel.
In Lille, a minute of silence was observed in tribute to Charlotte, a magistrate who ended her life at the end of August, a drama at the origin of the column published on November 23 in Le Monde.
Entitled "We no longer want a justice which does not listen and which times everything", this text has achieved a success as dazzling as it is unprecedented: it was signed by 7,550 professionals, including 5,476 magistrates (out of 9,000 ) and 1,583 clerks.
"Untenable situation"
An observation shared by the judicial hierarchy: the representatives of the heads of the courts of appeal and the judicial tribunals have in turn alerted to a "situation that has become untenable".
The first presidents of courts of appeal and attorneys general joined the rallies, as in Bastia.
The challenge even won the Court of Cassation: their magistrates had denounced Monday "a bloodless justice, which is no longer able to fully exercise its mission in the interest of litigants".
The Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, tried to calm the rebellion, which came to strike the Estates General of Justice launched in mid-October by the government. He announced on Monday the increase in the number of places in the competitive examination of the National School of Magistrates to allow the arrival of 380 judicial auditors in the courts from 2023, as well as the perpetuation of some 1,400 positions created in the local justice framework.
In a message Tuesday to magistrates and judicial officials, the minister said he was "determined to sustainably improve (the) working conditions and the functioning of justice".
And Wednesday, he reaffirmed on France Inter to have "repaired the emergency".
"I hope that there is no instrumentalisation (of the mobilization) but I cannot exclude it", he also slipped, a few months before the presidential election.
"Magistrates do not ride for anyone," replied, in the Parisian procession, Christophe Bouvot, of the National Association of Litigation and Protection Judges.
With AFP
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