In France, the “scales” do not get a good press, even if it is for a good cause. Twenty years ago, Parliament voted in favour of the status of “repentant”, hailed as a major step forward in the fight against organised crime. However, the ambition behind the birth of this new judicial actor, which has proven its worth in Italy or the United States, has remained a dead letter among the authorities and public opinion, as well as among the political power. After a long institutional journey, the repentant thought that it would finally find its place and prove its worth thanks to a new law to be presented in the autumn. The dissolution of the National Assembly at the end of June and the vacancy of the government will have decided otherwise.
It is the story of a long-lost appointment. Firstly, proof of culpable disinterest, the National Commission for Protection and Reintegration (CNPR), known as “des arrepentidos”, born from the Perben 2 law, in 2004, had to wait until 2014 before coming into force, due to. Lack of decree and funding. Today, with an annual budget of 780,000 euros, the CNPR did not protect, on 1Ahem In January, forty-two people, including those who repented and their families, three-quarters of whom were linked to drug trafficking. The Italian programme lists a thousand repentants, not counting their families. This asset was supposed to rebalance the judicial game in the face of a sophisticated mafia phenomenon. Wishful thinking.
The other original sin of this system lies in the wording of the law on repentance, which in theory should offer unprecedented access to the heart of organised crime. However, in 2004, for moral reasons, the legislator chose to prohibit this programme for people prosecuted for blood crimes. The word of the repentant was not evaluated solely on the basis of the criterion of effectiveness, but on the basis of its degree of proximity to evil. Marc Sommerer, current president of the CNPR, also lamented, before the Senate on 12 February, the complexity of a system that leads to incoherent situations.
For his predecessor, Bruno Sturlèse, president of the CNPR from 2017 to 2023, this reveals the “lack of pragmatism in a very Catholic view of guilt”. According to him, “The legislator was content to address the symbolic aspect of the repentant, structuring his project on the idea he had, at that time, of the level of social acceptability of a negotiation with a criminal and of his degree of repentance.”. Consequently, since it is not possible by law to benefit from the confessions of a repentant person prosecuted for a blood crime, magistrates must circumvent this prohibition by opening parallel proceedings in which they prosecute them for simple crimes which, in turn, make them eligible for prosecution by the state of repentance. A pirouette contrary to the rules of the adversarial procedure and which weakens the case.
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