French Judges Well Schooled For Bench
The Age
Friday August 25, 2000
Conmen, corporate fraud, vengeful neighbors, even violent cricketers - work is rarely dull when you're a judge and you happen to work in the south of France.
But practising the judicial arts in the playground of the rich and infamous is not by trial and error for Dominique Haumant-Daumas. She went to judges' school to learn them - a method she believes Australia should follow.
Female judges are no longer a novelty in Australia, but they are still in the minority. In France, most judges are women .
It's a situation that Judge Haumant-Daumas, visiting Australia on a lecture tour, said yesterday could be traced to the French method of selecting judges.
Unlike in Australia, where judges are chosen by governments then learn on the job by trial and error, French judges must pass a two-year training course.
``This is like the public service. I think it's a very good system for women. More women are passing the course than men," she said.
After graduating in 1982, Judge Haumant-Daumas started work as an investigative judge. The students at judges' school call them ``baby judges", or Little Blacks, in honor of the color of the robes they wear.
Now she is vice-president of the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Grasse, a court of similar status to Victoria's County Court. Her most famous case involved English cricketer Geoffrey Boycott. She found him guilty of assaulting his lover.
The next step is an appeal court appointment - becoming a Big Red, as Judge Haumant-Daumas puts it.
But Francedid not have a perfect record on female judges, she said. While women dominated the lower echelons, the top judicial spots remained almost exclusively a male preserve.
``Human rights in the French Revolution meant men's rights, not women's rights," she said. ``It's true we had Napoleon - he was a great man, a genius in many ways, but the criminal code he made was a monument to machismo ... I think because his wife Josephine (had an affair) with another man, he wanted to keep women at home and under the man."
© 2000 The Age