LEGAL experts and politicians called yesterday for the abolition of France’s Napoleonic system of criminal justice after the televised testimony of 13 men and women who had been wrongly jailed on paedophile charges.

The call for urgent reform to the 200-year-old institution of investigating judges was prompted by outrage over the way in which a young magistrate at Outreau, near Boulogne, had detained the thirteen defendants for three years and sent them to trial on flimsy evidence. Another defendant committed suicide in jail.

Judge Fabrice Burgaud, 34, added to the anger yesterday when he insisted that he had nothing to apologise for, and said that he was the victim of “deep injustice”.

President Chirac apologised to the Outreau thirteen last month, when five were acquitted on appeal of raping and abusing children as part of an alleged child-abuse network. Four people remain convicted after the original trial last summer. “I am anxious to offer my regret and apologies for what will always be seen as an unprecedented judicial disaster,” M Chirac wrote in a letter.

On Wednesday, France heard nine hours of emotional testimony by the 13 to a parliamentary inquiry into one of the worst fiascos in a system that has too often punished the innocent, and allowed cases to collapse from delay. France has been repeatedly criticised by the European Court of Human Rights and campaign groups for pre-trial detention that can last up to five years.

The Outreau 13, who include a priest, a court bailiff, a taxi driver and a bakery owner, described how Judge Burgaud tormented and humiliated them to extract confessions. He had ruined their lives, breaking up marriages and families, they said.

The judge rounded them up in 2002 after they were falsely accused by Myriam Badaoui, the woman at the centre of the trial, who, together with her husband and another couple, were the only ones to be convicted. The only other evidence came from confused accounts from Badaoui’s children, who were victims of her abuse.

Odile Marecaux described how Judge Burgaud turned up with 11 police officers and arrested her in front of her small son and daughter for sexually molesting children. Like those of other families in the case, the children were put into care. Alain Marecaux, the bailiff who was arrested, said that under questioning over two years, the judge called him a sodomiser. “First he would insult me. Then he would offer a deal: ‘If you confess, your children will be released.’ ”

The Outreau affair symbolises the failings of a prosecution system that depends, in serious cases, on a single juge d’instruction, or examining judge. “The juge d’instruction must be abolished,” said Renaud Van Ruymbeke, a judge who has investigated a series of financial and political cases. “The judge . . . is at the same time investigator and referee, so he is caught in an intellectual contradiction.”

Robert Badinter, a former Minister of Justice who led the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, said that the system of investigating judges was unfair. “The juge d’instruction is expected to be an impossible mixture of (Inspector) Maigret and King Solomon.”

The media joined yesterday in the outcry against the judge and an investigating system which one of the accused described as a shredding machine. Judge Burgaud’s cold zeal was of the kind applied in the terror trials of the French Revolution and in the show trials of Stalin, said France Soir.

“It is unacceptable that no mechanism could halt the judicial machine and this assault on the innocent,” it said.

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