Summary of the conference (Sources: Cour de cassation website)
The "Perben 2" law of March 9, 2004, which came into force on October 1, 2004, will celebrate its 20th anniversary this October.
Often criticized as the introduction of "justice on the cheap" and the Americanization of French criminal justice, what assessment can be made 20 years after its first implementation?
While the legalization of the CRPC was made possible thanks to the support of various bodies, a number of factors, from the opening up and comparison of rights to multiple constraints, actually explain its advent in French procedural law.
This is how the CRPC came to be used alongside other alternative procedures to the traditional trial, and is now implemented during police investigations or judicial inquiries. Although CRPC was originally inspired by the Anglo-Saxon guilty plea or plea bargaining, it is by no means a mere copy. In this effort to adapt the procedure to the specific features of the French criminal justice system, procedural adjustments have undoubtedly been necessary.
For these reasons, the institutionalization of the CRPC has led to changes in the procedure and, in so doing, to an upheaval in the very structure of the judicial process and an adaptation of the role of the players (prosecutors, judges and lawyers) in the penal chain.
Against this backdrop, we can now look ahead to the longevity of the CRPC by exploring its extension to specialized litigation (financial and environmental) on the one hand, and criminal litigation on the other.
The aim of this symposium is to address all these issues, bringing together the views of specialists - academics and legal professionals - for a comprehensive study of the CRPC, in order to assess its impact on the evolution of our criminal justice system.
