In accordance with the missions conferred on it by its Constituent Charter of June 26, 2019, the Joint Advisory Board the ethics of the judge-lawyer relationship is responsible for deciding on general or specific questions concerning the ethics of the judge-lawyer relationship.

Meeting in plenary session on June 20, 2022 at the Court of Cassation, the Joint Advisory Council for the ethics of the magistrate-lawyer relationship was officially presented with the reports of the three working groups set up during its inaugural session on June 26, 2022. May 2021.

They are the result of a year of reflection on :

• The publication of a collection of uses and good practices;
• Prospective reflections around open data, the architecture of courthouses, alternative methods of dispute resolution and the third criminal way;
• Reflections around concrete cases in terms of shared ethics.

The development and distribution of a guide to the uses and good practices of the relationship magistrates-lawyers aims to promote better information for professionals on the behaviors to adopt in their relationship, to reconnect with forgotten and yet unifying uses, or even to reinvest the notion of faith of the Palace. To provide these guides to professionals in practice, it seemed essential to the members of the working group to return to the essential principles of their profession and their respective ethics. At the heart of these principles is the litigant to whom the service of justice must be correctly and efficiently delivered.

The addition of examples from real situations, anonymized, tends to give relief and to facilitate the appropriation by each of the recommended uses and good practices. Thereby, From the compilation and classification work carried out, it emerged that the main difficulties in the relationship between lawyers and magistrates crystallized around the following points: referral requests; conflicts of interest; behavior in court; violation of the adversarial principle; bullying and obstructive behavior.

Finally, the “Prospectives” working group carried out a reflection on the impact of the development of open data, the construction of courthouses but also the emergence, both in criminal and civil matters, of negotiated justice (MARD) on the relationship between the two professions. The working group has also broadened its reflection to the third penal remedy.

Today there is a real desire to renew a serene and fruitful dialogue between magistrates and lawyers, not adversaries but partners in this permanent quest for human and quality justice. The recommendations resulting from the three reports, which will soon be summarized in a single document, appear to the Joint Advisory Council on the ethics of the magistrate-lawyer relationship as the beginnings of this rediscovered and appeased dialogue, and of facilitated exchanges which allow better to understand each other and to offer, together, better justice.