IN a bare-walled office on the fourteenth floor of a courthouse on the outskirts of Paris, Judge Françoise Barbier-Chassaing is preparing for the afternoon’s hearing. She has not had time for lunch and is unlikely to get home for supper until 9pm. But this is a light day. In French courts, hearings often last until midnight, and sometimes later.

“I have young children so I’m used to going without sleep,” the 43-year-old judge says. “I manage to remain alert, but it’s hard — and not only for me. The clerks, the lawyers, the prosecutors and the defendants all have to stay on as well.”

Late sittings have become common as French tribunaux try to clear a backlog of cases that stems from what the Magistrates’ Union describes as an unprecedented crisis. In a recent report, the union painted a stark picture of a legal system far from the high-flown principles of egalitarian justice that it is supposed to enshrine.

The union said that, amid chronic underfunding and an increasing criminal and civil workload, only 10 per cent of offences resulted in a conviction, and that only 30 per cent of sentences were carried out. Fines, community work and even prison terms are regularly ignored, with overwhelmed officials unable to check whether judicial decisions have been implemented.

The union went on to describe the dilapidated court buildings, late-night hearings, ageing computer system and job shortages that it said were undermining judicial credibility.

Magistrates are at the centre of the inquisitorial procedure that dates from the time of Napoleon Bonaparte, yet 317 judicial posts were vacant at the last count, the report said. Investigating judges have to oversee dozens of inquiries — 150 each in one court near Paris — and cases take months or even years to come to trial.

In Bordeaux, for instance, the average delay is two years between the start of the criminal process and the hearing. As a result, the union said, the public was losing confidence in French justice.

Dominique Barella, president of the Magistrates’ Union, says: “There are 5.4 million criminal procedures a year, but we have a capacity to judge just 600,000. In Britain you spend almost twice as much on justice. The reason is that you are an old democracy with an independent legal system. Here, the executive dominates the judiciary and the legislature. We are a developing nation as far as justice is concerned.”

Judge Barbier-Chassaing remains enthusiastic despite the difficulties. “We are all committed to what we do here and we make every effort,” she says, sitting behind a desk on which she has placed the yoghurt that would have been her lunch — if she had found the time . . .

It is Thursday, the day on which she presides over les comparutions immédiates. These are the fast-track cases in which defendants are sent for trial within a few days — usually 48 hours — of their arrest.

Judge Barbier-Chassaing deals with half a dozen or more such cases at a time. She arrives in the morning to read the files, begins sitting at 1.30pm and suspends the hearing two or three hours later. The three judges then retire to deliberate, and also to study a new batch of files on the defendants who will be brought to court for the evening sessions. The trials take an average of 30 minutes and Judge Barbier-Chassaing sits until the day’s work is finished.

Maître Yolaine Bancarel, a lawyer paid €442 (£304) out of a legal aid fund to be present in the court from 9.30am until the end of the day, says: “When I was here recently, they delivered the last verdict at 1.30am.” She has her own firm but, like all local lawyers, she spends one day a month representing defendants appearing under the fast-track procedure.

It’s a “social mission”, according to Maître Véronique Weisberg, who has arrived in court wearing a bright orange leather jacket, tossing it on to a bench before pulling on her black robes. “We come here on a voluntary basis, out of a sense of duty.”

Weisberg is defending one of two suspects in the first case of the day. They are men in their early twenties accused of receiving stolen goods — a Mini Cooper belonging to a heart surgeon in Paris. Although the case is complex, she has only a few minutes to read the papers and a few more minutes to talk to the defendants before they find themselves in the dock.

Judge Barbier-Chassaing runs through their backgrounds — their families, jobs and criminal records — summarises the main facts of the case, and listens as the men plead their innocence. The prosecutor, Michel Dray, speaks briefly to say that he is convinced of their guilt; Weisberg points to the holes in the prosecution argument and claims that there is little evidence to substantiate the charges. Then the men are led away and the next trial begins.

This involves an Algerian man accused of being an illegal immigrant and lasts less than 15 minutes. The next man in the dock has been accused of making death threats to a young woman. Judge Barbier-Chassaing notes that he has several convictions, including a recent €60 fine.

“Have you paid it?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t have any money.”

The court hears from the victim, who says that she has been terrified by the death threats from the defendant, who says that he has only sworn at her, and from Weisberg, who pleads for the man to be given a second chance.

Then the judges retire to deliberate. Half an hour later, their verdicts are delivered: community work for the men accused in the Mini Cooper case; prison for the Algerian immigrant; and a suspended sentence for the man who has made death threats.

As the clerk types out the judgments on a computer that uses 20-year-old software, Judge Barbier-Chassaing begins studying the dossiers for the evening trials.

She has still not had time to eat.

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