“We are going into the wall”alerted Rémy Heitz, Thursday January 9 on franceinfo. The Attorney General at the Court of Cassation has called for the recruitment of 1,500 magistrates and even more clerks, while France still has no budget for the year 2025. “Today, we have 4,000 cases in the territory waiting to be judged by the criminal courts. This figure was 2,000 five years ago”he regretted.
The figure put forward by Rémy Heitz can be found in the report References Statistics Justice published in 2024 with figures for the year 2023. Precisely, 3,968 criminal cases were still awaiting trial at the end of 2023, compared to 2,204 at the end of 2019, five years earlier.
It is important to distinguish, however, the first and the second instance. More than 80% of criminal cases await a first trial before an assize court or a criminal court, i.e. 3,346 cases. A minority – 622 – of cases are awaiting an appeal trial. The increase in the stock of ongoing cases is largely due to a traffic jam in the assize courts and criminal courts, the stock of which has doubled in five years, while that of the assize courts of appeal has increased slightly. .
Criminal justice is hit by a “paradox” that the report Providing justice to citizensfrom the general states of justice and published in April 2022, noted. In 2023, the assize courts handed down 2,999 judgments – at first instance or on appeal – almost as many as the 2,984 judgments handed down in 2005, 20 years earlier. In 2019, the number of decisions rendered by the assize courts had even fallen by a quarter compared to 2005, while the number of cases arriving in these courts had increased by 17%.
The report then explained that “if the number of files [avait] decreased, the number of days of court sessions increased, thus demonstrating the complexity of the cases judged”.
The direct consequence of this accumulation of files in criminal jurisdictions is the increase in justice delays. “Delays are increasing, they are not under control”lamented Rémy Heitz, recalling that the risk is “the release of people with dangerous profiles”.
According to appendix 30 to the 2023 finance bill, devoted to justice, the deadlines for being judged at the assizes have, in fact, lengthened in recent years. They reached 49.4 months in 2021, compared to 47 months in 2020. These delays lengthened by 15 months between 2005 and 2021, according to the report Providing justice to citizens. In other words, in 2005, a criminal case took less than three years to go before a criminal court, while it took more than four years in 2021.
Note, however, that deadlines are quicker when it comes to judging offenses in criminal courts. Nine months of waiting on average in 2023, according to the “Justice Statistical References” report, between the moment when the police or the courts become aware of an offense and the first judgment on the merits of the case.
However, this is an average. This can be much faster when it comes to immediate appearance and much slower when it comes to cases referred to court by an investigating judge. You have to wait more than four years on average for the most serious offenses to be judged. A duration which has also increased in recent years since it amounted to three years in 2013 for this type of offense. In summary: the more serious the offense, the more complex it is, the longer it takes to be judged.
The only exceptions to this rule: cases which result in no further action being taken. A case that does not proceed to trial may take even longer to conclude.
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