The case of a French man called for jury selection for his own trial

The French judicial system is a notoriously cumbersome creature and of course, as in many other countries, has been is prone to making mistakes, or at least taking a heck of a long time in admitting to, and then correcting them.

Take the case of Loïc Sécher, sentenced to 16 years for a crime he never committed, according to post-trial testimony by the victim.

Or Marc Machin, who spent six years in prison for a murder perpetrated by someone else.

Or Antonio Madeira, a man wrongly found guilty of raping his daughter, Virginie, and after serving six years was released - conditionally. He's still "guilty" in the eyes of the law even though in 2006 Virginie not only retracted her accusations, but published a book "J'ai menti" ("I lied") in which she admitted that she had made the whole story up.

And then of course there was the infamous Outreau child abuse trial, arguably one of France's biggest miscarriages of justice.

There's general agreement among political parties that the French justice system need overhauling, but reform is hard and appears to be in its own right a long and painful process.

Whatever eventually gets through parliament, let's hope it ensures that cases such as those mentioned (and many others of course) won't happen again, and that it can also avoid the administrative mix-up that occurred before the recent trial of a 66-year-old man in the town of Parthenay in western France.

He was accused of sexually molesting a boy between 1994 and 1996 - a charge to which he admitted after the victim revealed what had happened in 2006.

Yes those proverbial "wheels of justice" grind just as slowly here in France as anywhere else.

The trial was set to begin on December 10, but first a jury had to be chosen.

And among those called for selection on November 30...yes you see where this is going don't you, especially as the title has rather given it away...was the accused.

Not surprisingly, he ignored the summons and was fined €150 for not appearing for selection; a sum that was eventually lifted after the court realised the error it had made.

It might not be a tale on the scale of the miscarriages of justice that have continued to plague the system over the years, but perhaps it's an indication that something is not quite right even at the very core of the process itself.

Just a thought.

Outreau affair judge reprimand - a new French justice fiasco?

On Friday, Fabrice Burgaud, the investigating judge at the centre of the so-called Outreau affair - arguably one of France's biggest miscarriages of justice, received an official reprimand for his handling of the case.

And the apparent lightness of the penalty handed down by the disciplinary body, le Conseil supérieur de la magistrature (CSM), has already brought swift reactions.

A former Socialist party justice minister, Elisabeth Guigou, called the decision, "A new fiasco for (French) justice."

While Dominique Wiel, one of the defendants wrongly found guilty in 2004 and acquitted a year later said that he had expected Burgaud to have been prevented from working as a magistrate for at least a year.

"This type of decision is a bad example to young magistrates," he said. "It's telling them 'I can make a mistake but in the end I won't be punished for it'."

Burgaud was the investigating judge in the Outreau affair, dealing with an alleged paedophile ring in northern France.

And back in 1999 he began his inquiries that would lead to 12 innocent people being imprisoned, one suicide, two trials and the statement from the former French president, Jacques Chirac, declaring that the trial had been an "unprecedented judicial disaster".

When Burgaud took on the case, he was just 31 years old and it was his first job as an examining magistrate.

The allegations made by the two main protagonists in the case, Myriam Delay and her husband, Thierry, eventually saw 18 people - for the most part parents of children who had supposedly been the victims of paedophilia and incest - brought to trial in 2004.

Of the accused, four - including Delay and her husband - pleaded guilty and were sentenced, another seven insisted they were innocent and acquitted, while six others - all of whom maintained their innocence were all sentenced.

They appealed and a year later were also acquitted as the prosecution's case collapsed on the first day after a "coup de théâtre" with Delay finally admitting that they "had not done anything" and the she had lied all along.

The case made international headlines, threw the French justice system into the spotlight and led to that description from Chirac - not a man easily given to criticising the country's institutions that the affair had been "an unprecedented judicial disaster".

It also brought into question the exact role and power here in France of an examining magistrate - very much at the heart of reforms to overhaul the country's judiciary favoured by the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

All along unions have said that Burgaud had been made a scapegoat for police failures in the investigation process and even though the decision by the CSM is a relatively light one and is reportedly the lowest of nine possible reprimands his lawyers still aren't happy and it's likely that an appeal will be made on his behalf.

Burgaud is currently working in the Paris courts.