Honorable senator, we are pleased with the time you are devoting to this judicial reopening ceremony, a mark to which, be certain, we are all, in this Court, very honored and we thank you warmly.

Minister of Justice,

The Prime President has just told you how sensitive our Court is to your presence in this solemn hearing for the start of the new school year.

I obviously join this address and know that your assistance in this ritual is the mark of the consideration and esteem in which you hold the magistrates and civil servants who work within the supreme jurisdiction of the judicial order but also the attention you pay to all of the women and men who serve justice in our country.

You have placed the relations that we maintain, since my appointment in my current functions, whether those exercised at the Supreme Court or those which lead me to participate in the work of the CSM, under the double sign of an attitude of attentive listening and dialogue as well as a commitment to respect for the law and the operating principles of our institutions.

This provision allowed the development of nourished and constructive exchanges of views and I cannot thank you too much, in my personal name, in that of the magistrates of this public prosecutor's office and in that of the members of the formation of the Superior Council of Magistracy competent for public prosecutors.

Mr. President of the Constitutional Council,

Mr. Vice President of the Council of State,

Mr. the first President of the Court of Auditors and Mr. the Attorney General,

Here again, at the dawn of this new year, are the pillars of our jurisdictional order, whose essential task we know is essential for the clarity, legibility and modernity of our law.

Each of these institutions, in the place assigned to it by the Constitution and the law, is an essential guarantor of our legal and judicial system and, therefore, of our entire democracy.

You know that I am attached to the indispensable dialogue on many subjects which are common to us and I hope that the geographical joint ownership of one faced with the insularity of the other will not be considered as an obstacle to such exchanges.

Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the CSM, and in particular those of you who, dear friends, participate in the competent training for prosecutors.

At this very special moment, I would like to tell you publicly how the work of our CSM is, thanks to you, rich and fruitful, plural and rigorous, demanding and user-friendly, whether it be the formulation of opinions for appointments contemplated by the Minister of Justice or opinions proposed to the Minister in disciplinary matters.

Far from the fallacious echoes that some people sometimes like to peddle, as if it were necessary at all costs to tarnish our institution, I sincerely wanted to thank you for all this.

Mr. Defender of Rights,

Mr. Secretary General of the Government,

Mister secretary general of the Ministry of Justice to whom the whole public prosecutor's office is proud to present its congratulations on the occasion of your first quality representation exercise,

Ladies and Gentlemen, representatives of the highest civil, diplomatic, military and religious authorities,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Ladies and Gentlemen the first Advocates General and Advocates General, I could not do better, at the edge of these remarks, thinking of your immense contribution to the image of this Prosecutor's Office and to your mission in the service of law and law alone, than to recall the words spoken, during the formal re-entry of this Court on February 16, 1853, by the new attorney general at the time, Mr. de ROYER.

He expressed himself thus:

"I know, moreover, how much my new duties will be lightened by the skillful and devoted assistance of the attorneys general" (the general prosecutor's office and the whole court were not, at the time, a living symbol of gender diversity ) and he continued, " I know how important the Court attaches to their work and with what enlightened and sustained care they respond to this precious confidence, I would have no guide more certain than their experience and their collaboration" .

Times have changed, you will say, and the role of general counsel at the Supreme Court is now often viewed as that of general counsel at the Supreme Court.

Is the semantics stronger than the reality of institutions and their usefulness in the City.

Should we, at this point, defer to PLATO for whom "The perversion of the city begins with the fraud of words".

Should we remember that our public prosecutor's office does not belong to the hierarchy of the Public Prosecutor's Office and that it exercises no role in relation to the concept of public action for cases submitted to the Court?

The Attorney General at this Court does not receive any instruction from the Minister of Justice, except in the rare case of an order to appeal in the interest of the law, an appeal the outcome of which cannot change the situation of the parties. in the case concerned, a situation which is limited to the obvious violation of the law by a trial court when the parties have not, in due time, exercised themselves a remedy. Likewise, I cannot give any instruction whatsoever to the Attorneys General of the Courts of Appeal.

Each member of this public prosecutor's office, everyone should know, is independent and impartial and cannot receive instructions to conclude in this or that sense.

Each, in his place, the counselor and the advocate-general has only guide his conscience, his knowledge of the law and the service of legal ordering.

The Supreme Court does not judge cases, it judges decisions rendered by the trial judges, should we still remember?

Under these conditions, calling the Advocate General at the Supreme Court a party to the trial is not only an error, which certain members, in France, of the public prosecution before the courts and tribunals also commit by accusing this public prosecutor's office of not supporting their appeals, but still this qualification signifies ignorance of the functioning of this Supreme Court in particular and of the French judicial order in general.

The counselor CREPON, in his work "On appeal in cassation in civil matter" published in 1892 notes the extreme plasticity of the practices in matter of report and opinion of the rapporteur and insists on the habit in room of the requests and sometimes before the criminal chamber, to see the Public Prosecutor attend the deliberation in the council chamber, an essential counterweight, he says, to the influence of the reporting adviser who knows the file perfectly and can impose his opinion on the other advisers.

The dissenting opinion of seven judges, including the then President of the ECHR in the KRESS judgment of 7 June 2001, was thus expressed, and I quote:

“In our view, it would be desirable for the Court, in the future, to reconsider as a whole its case-law on the procedure before supreme courts which gives too good a place to appearances to the detriment of respectable national traditions and, ultimately, of the real interest of litigants. "

All this makes it bitter to see the condition in which this public prosecutor's office finds itself today while others, in France and abroad, in identical or similar situations, have been able to adapt to the considerations of the Court of Strasbourg without destroying a multi-secular system carrying enlightened justice.

The paradox culminates when we know that the lawyers at the Council of State and at the Court of Cassation, who have the noble task of representing the parties, the real parties to the appeal, have, by the means of their order, always wanted the maintenance or slight moderation of the old posture of the general prosecutor's office guaranteeing, in their eyes, a real equality of arms, transparency of the debates and intelligibility of the procedures for the preparation of decisions rendered by the Supreme Court.

I take this opportunity to salute and thank President LE PRADO, and his successor President THOUVENIN for the quality of the discussions that we were allowed to hold and their favorable reception for the conclusion of a work protocol between lawyers the Council of State and the Supreme Court and the general prosecutor's office of this Court intended to allow, in a certain number of situations, a more in-depth work of the members of this general prosecutor's office.

The draft protocol is about to be finalized and was submitted to your order a short time ago.

In the same spirit, and as I had envisaged during my installation speech, I have contacted some of the most important legal journals so that they can be published, when it seems useful to the legal community, the opinions of Advocates General, whether or not they have been followed by the Court.

I know that you, Mr. Prime President, are attached to the harmonious functioning of our Court and I appreciate your efforts, with the members of the Public Prosecutor's Office, to ensure that our house finds its marks as much as possible.

But what strikes the almost newcomer that I am, when he studies closely the functioning of this jurisdiction, and that he listens to each of the actors of the activity of this Court, is that our institution does not function as an institution, or even as a plural institution, in the exercise of predictability and predictability in the application of the standard, but that this operation is, in fact, often marked essentially by the individuality and atomization of the work protocols whose mapping is difficult to draw.

I am aware of the will and action of some, both at headquarters and at the public prosecutor's office, to better harmonize these protocols while respecting each other's roles.

I welcome them because the marginalization of the public prosecutor's office would risk leading to a confusion of postures which could lead the judge to no longer be that judge whose impartiality must be objective in accordance with the principles established by the European Court for the Protection of Human Rights. man and individual freedoms because the lack of this essential double look and the transparent window on civil society would necessarily be lacking for the judge, who would then try to take the pulse of civil society outside the adversarial and impartiality.

Let us make, Prime Minister, my dear colleagues, of this word of VOLTAIRE our maxim:

“One day everything will be fine, that is our hope; Everything is fine today, that's the illusion. "