The general inspections of the gendarmerie and justice issued their joint preliminary report on June 19 after the death of young Lyhanna. It was summed up bluntly: the August 2025 complaint “was not treated as a priority procedure”. The summary is accurate, but it shines the light on a single point, the decision of an agent. The public debate retained only that.
However, he describes, page after page, the dysfunction of a chain where the fatigue of a system weighs at least as much as a man’s hand. It is not a question of judging this pre-report, drawn up under the authority of a minister who, even before referring the matter to the inspection, had publicly named the culprits, but the accusatory communication which was made. Let’s decipher it, not to exonerate, but to distinguish the cause from the symptom.
Endemic waterlogging
Initially, the chain held. After the complaint filed on August 22, 2025 against Jérôme Barella by the parents of a young victim, the Toulouse public prosecutor’s office and the local gendarmerie brigade acted quickly and well. On October 8, all the acts (hearing the child, examinations, expert assessments) were completed, less than two months after the referral: a delay that the pre-report describes as “quite remarkable”. The incompetence suit therefore does not stand: the profession is there, proven. If the sequel failed, it was because from a certain point, professionalism was no longer enough, due to a lack of tools to relay it.
The matter then had to move from Toulouse to Auch: a divestment, a banal gesture, fatal here. In 2026, a file that changes courts still travels in an ordinary envelope that is not marked as urgent. Dispatched on October 15, the procedure only reached Auch on November 10, almost a month for one hundred kilometers. The Toulouse public prosecutor’s office could have notified the Auch prosecutor’s office and sent a digital copy. He didn’t do it. Not a legal error, but the reflex of an administration remaining in the age of the post office when crime entered the age of data.
On arrival, the letter reached the registration office, which was chronically late due to a lack of agents: the file was not an exception, but an ordinary case of endemic congestion. Although marked as priority on the slip, it is inadvertently placed in the pile of non-urgent items, where it will sleep for twenty-three days. If he came out on December 2, it was not thanks to any internal alert: it was because the child’s mother, worried, called. That a criminal procedure is only rescued from oblivion by a mother’s anguish says more than all the ministry’s circulars.
Punishment before analysis
Comes the public prosecutor, the most exposed. On January 9, 2026, he failed to check the “urgent” box on the instruction form and set a deadline for execution. It also redirects the procedure towards the wrong service: thirteen days wasted. But the emergency signal, in our justice system, lies entirely in this check box. Judicial software counts cases without knowing how to alert. In a country that dreams of the era of artificial intelligence, the fate of a child depends on a square of ink that an exhausted magistrate forgot to blacken.
A seasoned investigator, aware of the seriousness of the matter, receives the file. He will no longer accomplish anything after February 15, 2026. Negligence, it will be said; but also the reality of a single man, whose unit was mobilized for seven weeks by public order operations linked to the agricultural crisis. The mother called eight times, with no useful response. What was lacking was not the vigilance of the men, but the number, and the tool that would have kept watch in their place. Between this last act and Lyhanna’s disappearance on May 29, 2026, more than three months will pass in silence.
Here is the chain: exemplary at the start, broken with each transfer, and an organizational hole more gaping than a human error. What did we make of this observation? Even before the end of the mission – this is only a preliminary report – two gendarmes were automatically displaced and a magistrate stripped of his authorization to deal with minors’ cases. Punishment before analysis.
Adjustment variables
Designating culprits has immediate virtues: calming the clamor, offering a good conscience for having acted, appearing firm without paying anything. It’s a catharsis, it’s not a reform. We may sanction, decree the re-examination of 70,000 files, pile up the circulars: as long as the referrals grow faster than the means, no injunction will become an act for lack of the power to carry it out.
You don’t repair a short circuit by changing the fuse: here a clerk, a gendarme, a magistrate. The most exposed, not the most responsible, and they are neither indifferent nor cold. Some have been threatened, one lives under protection. We hand over to vindictiveness women and men who have become the adjustment variable of a system which exhausts them, exposes them, then abandons them.
The Superior Council of the Judiciary assesses the fault in light of the means given to avoid it. However, out of 1,000 euros of compulsory deductions, justice receives 5, compared to 17 for the environment and 26 for culture and leisure. The order of magnitude tells us our priorities, which politicians cannot pretend to ignore.
Shortage transforms error into inevitability
We are not pleading irresponsibility: that serious and proven faults be punished, so be it. But a breach is not a deliberate mistake and no one intended to do wrong. It is the failures of a system where agents work in scarcity that transform error and forgetfulness into inevitability. Looking too quickly for culprits to relieve oneself does not repair the broken chain. This is another way of remaining in denial.
Solutions, however, this pre-report in outline, are structural and not disciplinary: dematerialize the transmission circuits, provide our tools with a real alert on deadlines, fill the glaring shortage of personnel. Otherwise we will not be able to be surprised, in the next tragedy, to have seen nothing coming: everything will have been known and written, the evil as well as the remedy. Chamfort, a witty man and writer of the 18th century, already noted this: “In France, we leave those who set fires at rest, and we persecute those who sound the tocsin. » Let us be careful not to agree with him.
(1) Signatories: Nicolas Bergeman (judge), Martine Lambrechts (vice-prosecutor), Godefroy du Mesnil (vice-president of court), Loïc Bourgeois (lawyer), Denis Roucou (honorary jurisdictional magistrate), Christian Elek (honorary attorney general), Sophie Tubiana (honorary lawyer), Sophie Barbaud (honorary jurisdictional magistrate), Fabienne Basset (deputy prosecutor), Agnès Al-Takarli (vice-president of court).
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