(67) Justice in da Buff, by Azouz Begag - (4) Justice, Echo

Justice in da Buff

                               by Azouz Begag

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(4) Justice, Echo

          If I had to draw Justice, I wouldn?t pick a scale as a symbol. It would be a notched wheel. Metallic. It is stacked into another twin wheel, and another one, and one more, in an implacable layout, the whole thing resulting in a mesh.

Or it could be a mudflat, like those you find by the arms of the sea n Brittany, at low tide. Mesh or mudflat, it's the same: when there's a piece of your shirt that is stuck in the cold steel, the fall into the system's mechanism begins. And when your two feet are caught in the mud, you inevitably sink. Therefore the best you can do is to let yourself be dragged down while saving your strength. Only then you can hope to plunge little by little, while counting the seconds is the only thing to do. Those are the first images that come to my mind when reference is made to Justice.

          Justice. The word also makes me think, not of the balancing pole stability, that weighs the pros and cons to the nearest gram, but of a loss of balance. A wreck. What kind of wreck, I don't know exactly, but something that sinks, because when a man enters a court'house, he never leaves unharmed. He's transformed. He will never be the same. Courthouse, tribunal, Crown Court ' every time you enter this man-judging temple, this thing that supposedly guarantees modern countries' democracy, is set under the seal of anxiety. The life of the person to be tried is at stake. His psychological, mental, social and economical balance as well. Fundamentally, I'm afraid of this justice which determines men's lives, of these fishermen's nets that have been given the power to punish the evil-minded and the law infringers. I'm afraid because I am a dreamer. A child, forever and ever. Son of poor people, shantytown and ghetto survivor, I've always considered that the Justice of France ? welcoming land of my parents and my birth country- was not supposed to protect the rights of people like me. An intimate alarm always led me in this belief: the best way to respect justice was never to deal with it. Stay as far away as possible from the mudflat, the mesh.

          I held on for many years. One day, sadly, a painful divorce made me fall into the cold steel. In the Courthouse's mudflat. As a consequence, this experience has proved me that my personal "judgement" on this machinery functioning justifies all the fears I was intuitively fostering. I spent twenty years in a ghetto housing estate in the Northern part of Lyon, I remember dozens of friends who got caught up in the Saint Paul jailhouse's mesh- that is located right before the freeway you take to go on holidays!- all of those strongly participated in the idea I had oh the way judges treated ghetto kids. So depressing. Even for a dreamer. I picture those judges bending under dozens of files drowning their desk, working these cases on the production line and, finally, they pack them out, because they don't have time, money or energy. And your dreams of human justice will be dissolved.

          Ever since I was a kid, I?ve always been afraid of Justice. I've always been afraid of the police. In my mind, justice and police are synonymous. And when I think of the word "police", I see repression, control, harshness and fear. The thing that will find the failings in me, investigate on me, see me as an outlaw, and hand me over the Director of Prosecutions.

Send me to the ban of society. Of course, many people are socially raised to fear the authority the police represents, the power it embodies under its uniform, but I'm still convinced that immigrants, especially the swarthiest ones, have a more acute fear of the police than the natives. My father passed this burden on me.

So, instinctive fear of the police, and instinctive fear of White justice. For years I had a passionate interest in the racial discrimination issues that were raised in the Unites States in the sixties. Especially in the Martin Luther King's and the Civil Right Movement's struggle. I read appalling testimonies about the way White judges judged the Blacks during the dark period of the racial equality struggle.

The clashes between the WASP and the Afro-American communities were so deep that the Blacks refused to be judged by the courts where there were only white people on the bench. And they were right. To limit the risks of a racist reading of the facts, it seems much safer to promote racial equality among judges in the courts of the countries longing for multiculturalism. In France, I also think it would be better if the divorce court judges were not all women.

          In the history of the Black liberation movements in the United States, I liked to notice the controversial differences between Martin Luther King and Malcom X, the first one chose to believe in a multicultural society and state justice, the second one didn't trust white society at all and spoke in favour of racial separatism. Finally, the two leaders were murdered each in turn. I don't remember if the American police force found the murderers ?

          Will a white judge have the tendency to be stricter on a Black than on a White? How come almost all the men in the Lyon prison are of North-African descent? Is it because those people are culturally more inclined to be criminals than the natives? Or is it because judges are hasher on them in the Courthouse ?

I'd like to carry out an opinion poll in the ghetto districts? What kind of sensibility towards ghetto issues and their residents can you expect from a judge who's never been there? What does the system require to be a judge? To know the law perfectly, the statutes, the interpretations. To know them technically, the names, the numbers and the codes. You don't expect him to be sensitive. To increase democracy in the functioning of the justice system, they should stop recruiting the judges in Law schools. They should diversify the breeding ground of recruitment. They should ask the applicants to live two or three years in the city's most dangerous areas, for an intensive training period in a precarious environment. The suggestion is also valid for the recruitment of the "Ecole Nationale d'Administration?". It is not good for all the high-ranking officials to come from the same breeding ground, modelled on the same curriculum. When we talk about justice, you also talk about other institutions. And in the end you talk about society in general. It's impossible to talk about Justice itself.

          Pierre-Alain once told me, to apologize, that to judge is human. He smiled when saying the last word. I understood I was supposed to finish his reasoning by referring to the old saying: ?to err is human?. Justice would be allowed to make mistakes because men and women are the actors in the courthouse. Could it be different? I close my eyes, I try to imagine another world. I say to myself -what if there were- machines, computers in which you would embed these data? But who would embed the data? It could only be men and women. The problem is back to square one. Then? If there were animals, who would judge by the snout? Or children, who would judge "innocently"?

          It's an important matter. Questions are suddenly asked from all sides. It's an important matter because it?s an emergency: we have to increase the citizens? feeling that they have a real justice, the one that fairly decides, without any failing. I know nothing more painful than the anguish of living in a system where the citizens' relationships with the police and the justice system are unpredictable. To me, the height of terror is arbitrariness in the couple formed by the police and justice.

          If I lived alone on an island, like Robinson Crusoe, would I need policemen and judges to control my social life? The question may seem laughable, but it shows that as soon as people live in a community, their relationships have to be organized, codified ?that is written in some -codes-, civil code, criminal code, family code, highway code? But, its precisely this organization that puts me off actually. It is also a way of fixing social things. Everything that fixes, anticipates, irritates me. I am aware that development of men's lives requires a justice system. But it is inconsistent with the life of men.

There is, like for photography, the nude, a cultural debate between Southern people and Northern people. In the north, you draft contracts for every relationship men have. To contractualize, the word is meaningful. If I take marriage as an example, the idea of establishing a contract for this matter related to the love between two people and nothing else, was a culture shock. To go to the city hall, so that the mayor could read the French Marriage Law to the parties seemed violent to me. To find ourselves in this administration,' cold, old, dusty, didn't match our ceremonial dresses, our twenty year-old gourmands- smiles lightning up our life-discovering faces. Did we have to go through this ?

They had to explain to me that the law served the protection of our personal and common interests, that I had to see it like a system which helps citizens in their intimate and social relationships. It wasn't my thing. Not my idea of marriage. I had to do it. I had to get used to it. I signed a prenuptial agreement.