Le 1er December, by a majority vote, the National Assembly adopted a bill from the Republicans, with the support of the New People’s Ecological and Social Union and that of the National Rally, and despite the opposition of the deputies of the majority, aiming to create a court specializing in domestic violence. This jurisdiction would be intended to deal with offenses committed within the same family, either between spouses or cohabitants, or on the person of a child or an ascendant.
Such an initiative may seem legitimate. This violence – from which crimes are however excluded: murder, in particular “feminicides”, fatal blows, rape – has certain specificities: their strong psychological dimension, their often repetitive nature, associated with situations of authority or physical domination, the absence in general of economic connotation, of motive for appropriation, as criminologists say.
Should we therefore create a specialized jurisdiction, like what is currently the jurisdiction of minors, juvenile court and juvenile judge, within each judicial court? It’s not sure. The specificity of the jurisdiction of minors, in criminal matters, is based on a criterion that is both simple and objective: the minority of the perpetrator of the offense at the date of the facts. This criterion, by its very nature, requires a differential treatment of cases. This is not the case with intra-family violence: the perpetrator may very well, including in the same offending episode, be simultaneously involved in two types of delinquency.
Concomitance is not causation
In terms of judicial organization, it is complicated to create a court within each court. Such a reform would not fail to make the management of magistrates and clerks more cumbersome: it is called for neither by the National Conference of Presidents of Judicial Courts nor by that of the first Presidents of Courts of Appeal, who have not even not been consulted. The professional organizations of lawyers and the unions of magistrates have, for their part, shown themselves hostile to it.
Above all, this reform would distance justice from litigants for the same reasons: there are no plans ” at least “ than a court of domestic violence by court of appeal, which would force the majority of victims to travel long distances, for a dispute which is, by definition, that of intimacy.
And for what expected results? The Socialists in the Senate, like the Republicans in the Assembly, think they have found the philosopher’s stone to reduce feminicides by a measure which, paradoxically, does not apply to these crimes. In Spain, we are told, these have fallen since the court for domestic violence was instituted, which the bill attempts to reproduce in our legislation by copying and pasting.
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