FRANCE: A dispute between the French magistrature and the interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy ended up in the presidential palace yesterday, with a call to order by president Jacques Chirac.
The latest conflict within the French government started on Tuesday, when Le Monde published a report from the prefect of the Seine-Saint-Denis department north of Paris to the interior minister, in which Jean-Francois Cordet expressed alarm at the rapidly-rising crime rate.
Seine-Saint-Denis is home to 1½ million people, two-thirds of whom are foreign or of foreign origin. Mr Cordet reported a 14.11 per cent increase in violence against persons this year, and a 22.62 per cent increase in violent theft. Minors were responsible for 47.67 per cent of crime in the department.
On Tuesday evening, two CRS riot police were brutally beaten in an ambush by some 20 young men in an immigrant neighbourhood south of Paris.
Though the report on Seine-Saint-Denis criticised both the juvenile court at Bobigny and the police, Mr Sarkozy, the leading right-wing presidential candidate, placed blame entirely on the court, ignoring the shortcomings of the police, who are under his orders.
"Since the beginning of the year, the number of people imprisoned in Seine-Saint-Denis had fallen by 15.5 per cent," Mr Sarkozy said on September 20th. "This shows a form of abnegation [ of responsibility by judges]. I'd like to know how you prevent a delinquent from becoming a repeat-offender when you're not brave enough to put him in prison."
French judges and lawyers were outraged. It was not the first time that Mr Sarkozy blamed them for criminality in France.
In June, he said it was inadmissible that the minors' tribunal in Bobigny had not imprisoned a single person during last November's riots. (According to the prefect, one was sentenced to prison, of 85 detained.)
A year earlier, Mr Sarkozy said: "The judge must pay for his error" after three magistrates freed a repeat-offender who murdered a jogger.
On Thursday, Guy Canivet, the president of France's supreme court and the highest-ranking magistrate in the country, demanded to see President Chirac. In a statement, Mr Canivet denounced the "provocative" terms used by Mr Sarkozy about the justice system.
"This new attack on the independence of judiciary authority and the dispute that ensued . . . weakens the credibility of justice as well as the authority of the state."
The president of the Paris appeals court, the high council of the magistrature, and magistrates' and lawyers' syndicates also protested against Mr Sarkozy's statements. The socialist party accused the interior minister of using judges as a scapegoat to hide the failure of his own repressive policies.
All major French newspapers yesterday published front page headlines on Mr Sarkozy's row with the justice system.
Mr Canivet spent 45 minutes with Mr Chirac in the Élysée Palace, after which the president issued a statement demanding "respect for the independence of magistrates and for the necessary serenity which must prevail for them to carry out their mission."
But Mr Sarkozy was unrepentant and more populist than ever. "The French know well that I'm telling the truth," he said after visiting one of the wounded riot policemen in hospital.
"The French people are the judges. It's their judgement that counts," he added on the RTL radio station yesterday morning.
The government divided into two distinct camps: Mr Sarkozy, his interior ministry and the police on one side; the judges, President Chirac, prime minister Dominique de Villepin and Pascal Clément, the justice minister and a Villepin loyalist, on the other.
In this struggle for political power, the real problem - the deplorable state of France's immigrant suburbs, which were engulfed in weeks of rioting 11 months ago - was yet again forgotten.