Anne Wyvekens

The French Juvenile Justice System

Current French law on juvenile justice has a long story. It originated in the immediate aftermath of World War II and is still governed by an ordinance of 2 February 1945. In this paper we would like to consider especially the most recent part of this story and to examine whether and to what extent the French juvenile justice system possibly shows a trend towards becoming more repressive. Its founding principles — specialised jurisdiction, mitigated criminal responsibility due to age2Following art. 1 of the ordinance of 2 February 1945, minors (i.e., youth under 18) are to be judged by juvenile courts, not by ordinary ones. By way of comparison, on a total population of 62 millions inhabitants, 23.8% are under the age of 20 (INSEE Premiere, n° 1001, janvier 2005). If educational measures are supposed to be administered in priority to these minors, different ages have to be taken into account in order to determine what kind of measures will be choosen. An “educative sanction” can be taken for a minor aged 10 (see below), a sanction can be pronounced against a minor aged 13 and, on the contrary, youth between 18 and 21 can request to receive educational measures like minors. and priority placed on educational rather than law enforcement measures — were indeed at the beginning of the 2000s at the heart of a virulent debate, with the ministries of Justice and the Interior on opposing sides of the issue. Although several laws, including one adopted on 9 September 2002, introduced changes that could be interpreted as a movement towards a more punitive approach to juveniles, the original principles were nevertheless officially reaffirmed.

A justiça de proximidade, aproximar a justiça dos cidadãos?

In the1990’s, the idea of Proximity Justice gave birth to the Maisons de la justice et du droit – MJD [Houses of Justice and Law] that aimed to reaffirm the presence of the law in neighborhoods, to improve the attention given to its inhabitants, to facilitate their access to justice, reestablish links between the perpetrators of criminal offences and their victims, allowing a faster judicial treatment of small delinquency. These MJD, founded by local initiatives and several other practices, since 2002, were replaced by the “jurisdictions of proximity” integrated to the judicial building, whose competencies were then greatly expanded. This institutionalization resulted in the abandonment of qualitative preoccupation in favor of a quantitative management of mass disputes. And even if the judges of proximity recruitment should open up to civil society, its diversification was singularly restricted after a decision of the Constitutional Council.