Domestic violence: specialized centers to better coordinate the action of the courts of justice

This is one of the flagship measures, announced by the Minister of Justice Éric Dupond-Moretti: from Monday 1^um January 2024, each of France’s 164 courts and 36 courts of appeal will have to have a center specializing in intra-family violence.

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Better circulation of information

Concretely, these centers are not specialized jurisdictions, as there are for example for terrorism, but coordination areas managed by two magistrates, one from the Prosecutor’s Office and the other from the headquarters. Their objective is to better coordinate the work of the different judicial actors, to do “disseminate information” and thus avoid an escalation of violence, which can lead, in the most dramatic cases, to feminicide and/or infanticide.

“Around the table we have the public prosecutor who prosecutes the crimes, the judge for family affairs who has to manage the separation, the criminal judge who will judge the violence if necessary, the judge for the execution of the sentence, etc… All these magistrates who until now were separated, work as a team on managing a situation and share information that each may have »explains Clément Bergère, president of the judicial court of Sens (Yonne), to Franceinfo, where a center specializing in intra-family violence has recently been opened.

But this decompartmentalization of domestic violence cases will largely depend on the resources and personnel allocated to these new coordination spaces. Especially because domestic violence constitutes, remember The worldA “mass litigation”. In 2022, 49,616 sentences were ordered for this violence that occurred within the home. This is 123% more than in 2017, when 22,206 convictions were recorded.