Gérald Darmanin returned to government at Place Vendôme. Anxious to continue to display the image of firmness that he has built for himself within the Interior, the new Minister of Justice must first ensure an increase in his budget to respect the promise of creating magistrate positions. .
A surprise return that Gérald Darmanin wants to take advantage of at all costs. Appointed Keeper of the Seals this Monday evening, less than a few months after leaving Place Beauvau, the new Minister of Justice has already outlined his priorities, while promising to “work hand in hand” with the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau. “Our task is immense,” he has already admitted.
• Manage to obtain an increasing budget
“What we want is more speed, more firmness. We cannot do it with constant means,” judged the new tenant of Place Vendôme for his very first trip to the Amiens judicial court.
“We will be reasonable” because it will be necessary to “obviously” take into account national budgetary constraints, “but we must increase this budget of the Ministry of Justice”.
Will Gérald Darmanin win his case? Without a budget after the Barnier government's censorship, France fell under the “special law” on January 1st.
A purely technical text, only authorizing the government to raise taxes and spend the same credits as in 2024, without the new measures which appeared in the Finance bill (PLF) in preparation. This is not necessarily bad news for Justice – its budget had been increased in 2024.
As for the year 2025, after openly expressing his disappointment with the decline in justice resources, Didier Migaud obtained an extension of 250 million euros. He was thus following in the footsteps of Éric Dupond-Moretti who had won a 30% increase for his ministry between 2020 and 2023. Gérald Darmanin has a meeting on Monday with Amélie de Montchalin, the new Minister of Public Accounts.
• Speed up legal deadlines
Procedural times are particularly long in France. In criminal matters, the average time between the start of the investigation and the pronouncement of the conviction is 50 months. As for the procedures spanning almost a decade between the first instance and the Cassation, they are far from rare.
Gérald Darmanin therefore promised “faster justice” which would also require “more firmness” thanks to “more staff, more clerks”.
For several years, staff increases have already been underway with the promise of ultimately recruiting 1,500 magistrates and 1,800 additional clerks. Problem: it takes on average 2 and a half years to train a magistrate, making it impossible to quickly reduce delays in the field.
The magistrates' union has also estimated on several occasions that even if these hires were successful, they would still not allow France to significantly reduce delays.
• “Clean the prisons”
Gérald Darmanin went this Wednesday evening to the Liancourt penitentiary center (Oise). The Minister of Justice took the opportunity to give his vision of the causes of prison overpopulation in France. If sentences of less than two years are generally carried out under an electronic bracelet, due to lack of space in prison, the new Minister of Justice sees things differently.
“I am very sensitive to the idea that small sentences must be carried out,” judged the minister, believing that it is necessary to “debureaucratize” prisons to “do things much more on a human scale, almost everywhere in the territory national”.
More than 80,000 people are currently incarcerated – a record figure which raises prison density to 128.5%. The objective of building 15,000 additional prison places should not be achieved “before 2029, in the best case scenario” Didier Migaud had already warned in November.
More broadly, Gérald Darmanin intends to “cleanse prisons of all the difficulties that prison officers experience. Prison centers must no longer be “a place for the reproduction of crime”.
The new minister, however, refrained from any details on specific measures.
• Pass the law against drug trafficking
Nearly two months after the trip of the Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau and his counterpart at the time to Justice in Marseille to announce a vast plan to fight drug trafficking, Gérald Darmanin wishes to take it up on his own.
The fight against “narcobanditry and drug trafficking will be the absolute priority of my mandate at the Ministry of Justice”, he announced on Tuesday morning during the transfer of power.
It is the Senate which should take up several of the announcements made in November, the creation of a national prosecutor's office dedicated to improving the protection regime for repentants who collaborate with the police, by voting on them at the end of January. This text should then arrive at the National Assembly.
“In the coming days, prosecutors will receive very firm criminal policy instructions” to “systematically combat drug trafficking,” the minister further assured.
• Include consent in the criminal definition of rape
During his farewell speech on Tuesday, Didier Migaud raised the question of including consent in the criminal definition of rape among the files on the new minister's table. Gérald Darmanin then did not bounce back. But questioned this Wednesday, the Minister of Justice mentioned a text of law “which is arriving for next spring”. “I will have the opportunity to talk about it with parliamentarians and with the Prime Minister.”
If the criterion of absence of consent is indeed present in rape investigations, particularly during interrogations, this notion is not established as such among the criteria characterizing rape, namely violence, coercion, threat or surprise. This phenomenon results, according to certain jurists, in numerous complaints being closed without further action, due to a lack of sufficiently serious offences.
Although a bill was certainly tabled by La France insoumise in the fall, it is currently at a standstill. On the day of the verdict in the Mazan rape trial, two transpartisan bills were also tabled.
But the profile of Gérald Darmanin, who should then give the government's position on the matter, risks giving rise to debate. The minister has is the subject of a complaint for rape and abuse of weakness. In this context, he benefited from a dismissal and a classification without further action. Last March, Emmanuel Macron explained that he was open to the criminal definition of rape being able to evolve.
