Sarkozy on Collision Course With Judges Over Investigating Magistrates

Nicolas Sarkozy will today announce a fundamental shake-up of the French legal system amid an outcry from judges who fear changes would weaken their independence and hamper corruption investigations.

The French president, a lawyer himself, is expected to announce the biggest change to Napoleonic law for two centuries by abolishing the investigating magistrate, one of the great symbolic figures of the French system.

Described by Balzac as "the most powerful man in France", the independent, examining magistrate in charge of complex criminal cases has been immortalized in French cinema and fiction. Unlike Britain's adversarial system of prosecution versus defence, the French system gives investigating magistrates their own mission to uncover the truth, gathering all the evidence, both incriminating and exonerating, before a case goes to court. They have often allowed suspects to be imprisoned for long periods without trial.

France's independent investigating magistrates became famous for their work on a series of corruption scandals in the 1980s and 1990s, pursuing the highest level of the French elite, from the Elf oil sleaze scandal to corruption during Jacques Chirac's tenure as mayor of Paris. But an investigative magistrate was also at the center of the biggest miscarriage of justice in France since the second world war: the Outreau child abuse case in 2004, in which more than a dozen innocent people were wrongly imprisoned, and children separated from parents on the basis of the wrong hunches of one magistrate.

Since the Outreau case, successive governments have been studying how to remedy the huge damage done to French trust in the justice system, and how to ensure the examining magistrate's work is properly monitored.

Le Monde reported yesterday that Sarkozy planned to scrap the independent examining magistrate and hand investigations over to the state prosecutor's office. The paper said the prosecutor's office would not be made independent of the justice ministry, raising fears that the government could have control over sensitive investigations.

Independent examining magistrates deal with less than 5% of criminal cases, but these are usually sensitive and complex cases.

The leading anti-terrorist judge, Gilbert Thiel, told AFP he feared sensitive financial and political cases risked being hampered by political considerations. Another judge, Marc Trévidic, said: "When there is a mistake at a hospital, we don't talk about abolishing doctors."

The head of the USM magistrates union, Christophe Regnard, called it a "major step back for individual liberties". saying political powers wanted to settle scores after the politicians and businessmen were targeted by examining magistrates in the 1980s and 1990s. Another magistrates' union, on the left, appealed for a boycott of Sarkozy's key speech to judges this afternoon.

Sarkozy's spokesman would not confirm the details of the president's judicial reform before his speech. Patrick Devedjian, the minister for economic recovery and once one of Jacques Chirac's lawyers, told AFP he was in favor of reforming the status of examining magistrates.

The Socialist said they were "vigilant" and concerned.