As of Monday, July 1, new rules will govern placement in police custody. The reform provides in particular for the obligatory presence of the lawyer to start the hearings, unless the person questioned explicitly waives this. Measures taken to comply with European law, but which relaunch debates between police officers and lawyers.
The main fear lies in having to wait for the lawyer: “Imagine this situation recurring for other cases, and you will quickly saturate the police custody premises as well as the investigating services, who will find themselves completely blocked in the progress of their investigations“, explains Marc Hocquard, general secretary of the Unsa police.
Waiting for a mandatory lawyer
Not necessarily, according to those who defend those in custody, such as Romain Boulet, co-president of the Association of Criminal Lawyers: “If the lawyer cannot intervene within two hours, they can request the appointment of a court-appointed lawyer.“. As for the possibility of notifying a wider range of people of his custody, “tomorrow a person in police custody will be able to inform a possible accomplice of this situation, and thus allow the disappearance or even destruction of evidence”, fears Marc Hoquard.
Difficult to imagine in the eyes of lawyer Romain Boulet: “The law gives police three hours to carry out minimum checks.“, he explains. “And I still imagine that if people in custody had fun designating individuals involved in their affairs by giving an additional telephone number, it would allow the police to increase their investigations.“.
The lawyer, for his part, would have liked to see another European directive applied: the possibility of accessing the investigation file from the moment of police custody. But on the police side, the unions already fear that these new measures will further disgust investigators, while the judicial police are struggling to recruit due, they say, to the cumbersome procedures.
