France: Justitia 4.0 – the pros and cons of digital court proceedings and notarial records in France

The Programming and Reform Act for Justice (LPJ) of 23 March 2019 provides that disputes with a dispute value of less than EUR 5,000 can be settled in a fully digital procedure:

• online contact with the court,
• digital transmission of evidence and
• digital monitoring of the procedure.

Since January 2018, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Justice have been working together on the digital conversion of the criminal proceedings in order to make criminal justice more efficient by abolishing paper and handwritten signatures from the notification to the execution of the sentence. For the time being, this programme is in the trial phase at the courts of Amiens and Blois.

The digitalisation of court proceedings initially only concerns documents and pleadings that are exchanged and submitted via secure platforms of the Ministry of Justice. As regards criminal proceedings in particular, the first attempts in Amiens and Blois were limited to digitally signed proceedings which were successfully transmitted to the competent court by the police and the Gendarmerie.

Autor: Maurice Hartmann