They are called Damien, Rémy, Magalie, Sylvain or even Sandrine and are preparing to go to Paris on foot with five other traveling companions. Eight hundred kilometers of a ”
fathers march for parental equality “, From Marseille, in order to” advance family justice “, explains Rémy. “In France, joint custody is only pronounced in 12% of cases by family court judges, against nearly 46% in Sweden or 30% in Norway”, he explains, figures from
INSEE supporting.
Through this march, the collective, created in January 2020, wishes to put back on the media and parliamentary scene a debate that regularly divides French political life. In 2013 already, this proposal had arrived on the desks of the deputies before being taken a government stop then. Rebelote in December 2017, where a bill coming from the Modem and aiming to establish joint custody of children as a basic principle got stuck on the benches of Parliament. The latter had aroused an outcry from a feminist collective.
A proposal that comes back regularly
“According to the Ministry of Justice, 18.8% of fathers apply for joint residence, and 17.3% of them obtain it. This law written on a corner of the table will therefore only concern 1.5% of couples, ”detailed, among others, this collective in a column published in the newspaper The world.
Those who set off this Wednesday from Marseille take up this proposal and add two others: a strengthening of the law against the non-representation of children and measures against voluntary geographical distance. Their initiative found some
political support, among which Nathalie Delattre (Radical Movement), vice-president of the Senate. Two bills on joint custody are currently in the legislative circuit. The most recent, recorded in February 2021, states that “in the absence of agreement between the parents on the child’s mode of residence, the judge gives priority to the accommodation of the child in a balanced manner between his two parents. “.
Last June, in this regard, the Minister of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, in a session in the Senate indicated that he did not consider “not necessary to legislate in the matter”, the judge appreciating “on a case by case basis the interests of the child”.
In France, four million children have parents who are separated.