Bobigny sleeps on the floor

On Wednesday, the Senate voted, 252 to 80, so that rapes committed against children will never again be time-barred. Until now, only crimes against humanity escaped the clock, and a victim could file a complaint until the age of 48. The National Assembly had voted a broader text in the summer. The 80 against, mostly on the right, defend limitation periods as a principle of law and fear trials without evidence forty years on. A final vote comes on Tuesday, then the two chambers must agree. A child raped in 2026 will be able to speak in 2070.

Never again “too late”

Eight days earlier, twenty kilometres from the Luxembourg Palace, four lawyers from the Seine-Saint-Denis bar entered the holding cells of the Bobigny courthouse at 6.20 am. Eight cells, seventeen minors, ten mattresses. “No minor had a mattress,” writes the head of the bar, Sandrine Beressi. The prosecutor admitted the conditions were “not acceptable”.

« You have the lawyer who knows the law well, and you have the lawyer who knows the judge well »Coluche, who died on 19 June 1986

Forty years earlier

Coluche would have turned 82 on Wednesday. He said there are two kinds of justice, that of the lawyer who knows the law and that of the lawyer who knows the judge. The law moves forward by amendment and the cells by lawyers’ reports. In between are those waiting for a mattress. Which of the two kinds of justice did a Bobigny child meet last week?