The court sentenced France for slowness in divorce proceedings
The court of Bobigny (a suburb of Paris) found the French state guilty of dragging out a divorce process. As RFI reports, the woman who filed the lawsuit had to wait for the official dissolution of the marriage for more than 11 months.
“Unfortunately, this case is not exceptional,” noted the newspaper Le Figaro: due to a shortage of judges, divorce becomes long-awaited for residents of the Paris region also from a procedural point of view.
“My client filed for divorce on November 21, 2014, and her meeting with the judge was scheduled for October 27, 2015,” said Julien Simonnot, the lawyer for the plaintiff who won the case against the French state in the court of Bobigny. The lawyer called the delay in the divorce procedure “tantamount to forced marriage.” However, the compensation for 11 months of “forced marriage” turned out to be not so large: the plaintiff was awarded 700 euros.
Meanwhile, dragging out the divorce process is not such a harmless thing when it comes to families with children, notes Valérie Grimaud, head of the family affairs commission at the bar association of the Seine-Saint-Denis department. “Until the divorce is finalized, a schedule for meetings between one parent and the child cannot be established. In addition, the other parent does not receive alimony during this time,” Grimaud recalled. “If you have a salary of 3,000 euros, it’s not so bad, but if it’s 1,000 or 1,200, it’s a completely different matter.”
Recall that in May, deputies of the French National Assembly voted for an amendment allowing divorces without going to court. The amendment makes it possible from 2017 to divorce by mutual consent by registering a corresponding agreement signed by the spouses and their lawyers with a notary. This procedure, however, cannot be applied to spouses if their minor child is against a divorce without a court.
In France, courts in 2014 (the latest available statistics) issued more than 120,000 divorce decisions. In 75% of cases, the divorce application was filed by a woman.