France's prosecutor shortage was no surprise
A number has been circulating in France in recent days: the country reportedly has three to four times fewer prosecutors per capita than its European neighbors.
Presented as a revelation in the aftermath of the Lyhanna case — the disappearance and death of an 11-year-old girl in the Gers region, and the outcry over how earlier complaints against the suspect had been handled — the figure looks, at first glance, like a discovery born of crisis.
It isn’t. France’s prosecutor ratio is not new. Nearly identical figures appear in questions submitted to the French government as far back as 2019, repeated again in 2024. The real question isn’t whether France has too few prosecutors — that has been established for years. It’s this: why has a problem documented by the government’s own administration for nearly a decade produced a reform that was already considered insufficient at the moment it was passed — and why did it take a tragedy to put the issue back on the agenda?
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
At a Glance
France has 3.2 prosecutors per 100,000 residents, against a European median of 11.2 (average: 12.2) — a ratio documented in parliament since 2019, not a discovery made in 2026.
The justice reform passed in 2023 created 1,500 additional magistrate positions, even though an internal government survey had estimated the actual shortfall at 5,000.
French prosecutors handle a far larger volume of cases per capita than their European counterparts — a gap that partly reflects France’s heavier caseload, and partly how the country defines “prosecutorial work” in the first place.
The numbers behind France’s prosecutor shortage
The 2024 report from the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), the Council of Europe body that regularly evaluates judicial systems across 44 member states, places France second-to-last in Europe for prosecutors per capita, tied with Ireland. At the other end of the scale, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Moldova each have around 24 prosecutors per 100,000 residents.
This is the backdrop against which the Lyhanna case unfolded. The schoolgirl disappeared on May 29 from Fleurance, a town in the Gers department in southwestern France, and her body was found in early June. The suspect had already been the subject of two rape complaints that went nowhere, and had not yet been questioned by investigators at the time the girl disappeared. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin called it an “institutional failure,” apologized to the family, and ordered a review of 70,000 complaints involving children. It was in the wake of this controversy that the CEPEJ ratio was picked up by several outlets as a structural explanation.
How the gap became official policy
What hasn’t been sufficiently highlighted is how old this diagnosis is.
As early as 2019, a written question submitted to the French National Assembly (no. 712) already warned of a justice system “increasingly strained by a lack of resources,” citing a ratio of 3 prosecutors per 100,000 residents — far below European norms — and a caseload per capita well above the European average. France’s National Conference of Public Prosecutors was already calling, at that point, for major reform.
Five years later, in 2024, another written question (no. 2763) repeated almost identical figures: 3 prosecutors per 100,000 residents against a European average of 11, and a caseload exceeding 2,000 files per prosecutor, compared with a European average of 204. In between, a reform did take place: the Justice Ministry’s orientation and programming law (LOPJ), passed in November 2023, which provides for a net increase of 10,000 jobs at the Justice Ministry by 2027, including 1,500 magistrate positions and 1,800 court clerks.
The figure of 1,500, however, was not the one some lawmakers had pushed for. An amendment introduced on June 17, 2023 — numbered CL624, sponsored by lawmakers Iordanoff, Lucas, and Regol during the National Assembly’s review of the LOPJ bill — proposed raising the figure to 5,000, citing an internal headcount survey by the Justice Ministry’s Directorate of Judicial Services from February 2022, which had estimated the actual magistrate shortfall at 5,000. That amendment did not pass. The law that was ultimately adopted set the target at 1,500 — less than a third of the figure the administration itself had put forward.
In other words: by the time the LOPJ was adopted, the debate over the scale of the shortage had already happened, with the numbers already on the table. The reform that was ultimately approved represented, by the lawmakers’ own account during the debate, a fraction of the estimated need. That choice — made openly, on the record — shaped the resources available to the Auch prosecutor’s office by the time the Lyhanna case reached it.
What the numbers reveal
The “prosecutors per 100,000 residents” ratio has one limitation: it says nothing about how much work each prosecutor actually handles. That’s where the comparison becomes more revealing — and more complicated.
The European median for prosecutors per capita is 11.2, while the average is 12.2 — the two figures differ because a handful of Central and Eastern European countries with very high prosecutor counts pull the average up relative to the midpoint. Either way, France’s 3.2 sits well below both. According to CEPEJ, a French prosecutor handles an average of 6.4 criminal cases per 100 residents, against a European median of 2.3 — roughly 2,000 cases per prosecutor per year, compared with an average of 204 across Council of Europe countries.
CEPEJ itself flags this particular comparison as one to read with care. In France, prosecutors are the default recipients of nearly every police report filed, including cases that are closed without further action almost as soon as they arrive — a different starting point from systems where police pre-screen cases before referring them on, as is common in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions. Part of the gap between 2,000 and 204, in other words, reflects where each country draws the line between “police work” and “prosecutorial work,” not just differences in workload for a comparable task. What the figures reliably show, regardless of how the count is drawn, is that the French prosecutor’s office functions as the funnel through which an unusually large share of all police activity passes — a structural reality that holds even once the measurement caveat is accounted for.
This imbalance isn’t a geographic inevitability, in any case. Other countries with similarly low numbers of prosecutors have chosen to compensate differently. Italy, for instance, also has relatively few prosecutors per capita — 3.8 per 100,000 residents, close to the French figure — but has built a layer of support staff around them: the vice procuratori, who handle hearings for minor offenses, legal research, and the preparation of case dismissals. CEPEJ counts 76 such support positions per 100 prosecutors in Italy, compared with 19 in France.
France, then, has effectively made a double choice that is rarely framed as such: few prosecutors, and few people to support them. The number of lawyers follows the same pattern — 106.6 per 100,000 residents, against a European median of 155.5, one of the lowest rates on the continent, far behind Germany (195), Spain (308), or Italy (398.7).
It’s worth being precise about timing here, too. The CEPEJ data driving the current debate cover 2022 — a full year before the LOPJ was even adopted, let alone implemented. The 1,500 additional magistrate positions are still being phased in through 2027, so their effect on France’s standing relative to the European median hasn’t just gone unmeasured — it couldn’t have been measured yet, since the reform postdates the most recent comparative data entirely.
Why this goes beyond France
France’s debate over prosecutor staffing isn’t unique to France. Similar dynamics — administrations documenting unsustainable caseloads, practitioners calling for reinforcements, and political action arriving mainly after a high-profile case exposes the consequences — have played out in other justice systems facing comparable strains, including in parts of the United States, where prosecutor and public-defender caseloads have drawn scrutiny in several jurisdictions. As the caseload comparison above suggests, these systems aren’t measured on quite the same scale — but the underlying pattern, of documented strain followed by reactive rather than proactive reform, recurs regardless.
For a reader unfamiliar with the French system, the comparison with Italy’s vice procuratori model is also instructive: it shows that a prosecutor headcount similar to France’s can produce very different outcomes depending on whether that core group is, or isn’t, surrounded by support staff designed to absorb part of the workload. The relevant question isn’t just “how many prosecutors,” but “how many people, in total, can move a case forward before it ever reaches a prosecutor’s desk.”
At the European level, CEPEJ notes that Central and Eastern European countries — which inherited a model where the prosecutor’s office is involved at every stage of criminal proceedings — tend to report much higher staffing levels than Western Europe, without this necessarily meaning a more efficient system, since the workload per case differs. Comparing raw ratios without this context can lead to hasty conclusions about what “works” elsewhere.
Analysis
The broader context is unambiguous: between the 2019 parliamentary question and the 2024 one, the cited figures barely moved. In that span, a reform was debated, passed, and implemented, without the underlying gap to the European median being closed in the terms in which it had been described.
The power dynamics are visible in the gap between 5,000 and 1,500. That’s not a rounding error — it’s the outcome of an explicit budget trade-off, debated openly in parliament, in which an estimate produced by the administration’s own Directorate of Judicial Services was scaled down by more than two-thirds before the law was passed. Officials at the time presented the 1,500 figure as a workable compromise within fiscal constraints — a defensible position on its own terms. In practice, though, it set the ceiling on available staffing for a decade, regardless of what might happen afterward.
The real question is this: does a problem documented by the government’s own administration, repeated almost verbatim across two legislative terms, lead to a response proportionate to what it describes — or does the political response stay structurally anchored to what’s budgetarily acceptable, until an outside event changes the terms of the debate? The aftermath of the Lyhanna case — a review of 70,000 complaints, an emergency meeting of senior prosecutors — suggests such a shift can happen. But it happened outside the normal budgetary and legislative cycle, under emergency pressure, rather than as a continuation of the program voted into law in 2023. Magistrates’ professional bodies have said, in the wake of the case, that prosecutors were already managing heavy caseloads and government priorities that shift with the news cycle — an argument that places the question of resources, not individual blame, at the center of the debate.
The Bottom Line
The 2023-2027 justice reform program runs out in under two years. By then, CEPEJ will publish new data, showing whether the 1,500 new positions narrowed the gap to the European median — or whether the same gap, documented in 2019 and again in 2024, simply rolled over into another decade. Between now and then, the question raised by the Lyhanna case won’t be whether a sufficient number was ever identified — it was, more than once, by the government’s own administration. It will be what it takes, short of a tragedy, for a documented problem to receive a response that matches its scale.
Sources: European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), 2024 report · French National Assembly written questions no. 712 and no. 2763 · National Assembly amendment CL624 (June 2023) · Légifrance · France 24 · France Info