Question 16753 — judicial and legal professions

Summary

Mr. Sylvain Carrière alerts Mr. Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, about the payment deadlines for legal experts. The latter, particularly in criminal matters, warn of chronic delays in payment of their missions by the judicial institution. Several experts from Hérault questioned Mr. MP on this situation: due to lack of payment for their previous missions, some find themselves forced to now refuse to new criminal expertise. As already highlighted in a Senate information report in 2021 on psychiatric and psychological expertise in criminal matters, this activity is experiencing increasing disaffection among professionals, largely due to these payment delays. Their role being crucial in carrying out investigations and ensuring that magistrates have all the necessary information, this growing disaffection constitutes a serious problem for the French judicial system. A bill aiming to improve the means of action of the Agency for the management and recovery of seized and confiscated assets and to facilitate the exercise of its missions is currently under discussion to try to respond to this situation, but it does not seem likely to resolve the problem as it stands. The text in fact provides for the establishment of a capped payment period 180 days, running from a date set by the judicial authority itself and not from the day on which the expert files his request for payment. This method of calculation would cause experts to wait even longer than this 180-day period, already much longer than that applied to other State service providers. Indeed, the public procurement code imposes a maximum period of 60 days to pay a supplier, from submission of his request. This difference in treatment, to the detriment of legal experts, raises questions regarding the principle of equality before the law. Under these conditions, the MP asks the Minister what he intends to put in place to reduce payment deadlines for legal experts. He also asks him if he intends to initiate a consultation with the representatives of the legal experts to establish what other Measures are necessary to strengthen the attractiveness of the profession and to improve their conditions of practice.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

Timeline

No timeline events have been ingested for this record yet.

Votes

No vote records are attached yet.

Versions

No version snapshots stored. Document URLs remain at the source.

Documents

No documents linked.

Sponsors

No sponsors or actors listed by the source.

Related records

No cross-record relationships stored yet.