The National Police, formerly known as the Sûreté nationale, is one of two national police forces of France, the other being the National Gendarmerie. The National Police is the country's main civil law enforcement agency, with primary jurisdiction in cities and large towns. By contrast, the National Gendarmerie has primary jurisdiction in smaller towns, as well as in rural and border areas. The National Police comes under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior and has about 145,200 employees. Young French citizens can fulfill their mandatory service in the police force.
Sûreté is, in some French-speaking countries or regions, the organizational title of a civil police force.
Law enforcement in France is centralized at the national level. Recently, legislation has allowed local governments to hire their own police officers which are called the police municipale.
A Search and Intervention Brigade, Investigation and Intervention Brigade or Anti-Gang Brigade) is a unit of the French National Police. The first units were formed in 1964 and carried out their tasks under the command of the Paris prefecture.
French law has a dual jurisdictional system comprising private law, also known as judicial law, and public law.
The National Gendarmerie is one of two national law enforcement forces of France, along with the National Police. The Gendarmerie is a branch of the French Armed Forces placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Interior, with additional duties from the Ministry of Armed Forces. Its responsibilities include policing smaller towns, suburbs and rural areas, crowd and riot control, and criminal investigation, including cybercrime. By contrast, the National Police is a civilian law enforcement agency that is in charge of policing cities and larger towns. Because of its military status, the Gendarmerie also fulfills a range of military and defence missions. The Gendarmerie has a strength of around 102,269 people.
The Haitian National Police is the law enforcement and de facto police force of Haiti. It was created in 1995 to bring public security under civilian control as mandated in Haiti's constitution. As of 2023, the force has 9,000 active duty officers.
The Direction régionale de la police judiciaire de la préfecture de police de Paris, often called the 36 quai des Orfèvres or simply the 36 (trente-six) by the address of its headquarters, is the seat of the Paris regional division of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police. Its 2,200 officers investigate about 15,000 crimes and offences a year.
The Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général was France's external military intelligence agency from 1871 to 1940. It was dissolved together with the Third Republic upon the armistice with Germany. However the term "Deuxième Bureau", like "MI6" and "KGB", outlived the original organization as a general label for the country's intelligence service.
The Central Directorate of the Judicial Police is a directorate of the National Police of France with national and territorial responsibility for investigating and fighting serious crime. It was formed in 1907 and subsequently restructured under an ordinance dated 5 August 2009.
The General Directorate for National Security is the national police force of the Kingdom of Morocco. The DGSN is tasked with upholding the law and public order. It was founded on 16 May 1956 by King Mohammed V. It works alongside the Gendarmerie Royale and the Forces Auxiliaires.
The Tribunal judiciaire de Paris, located at the Judicial Campus of Paris in Batignolles, is the largest court in France by caseload. It replaced the capital's former Tribunal de grande instance and Tribunal d'instance under an amalgamation of jurisdictions that came into effect on January 1, 2020.
In France, a cour d’appel of the ordre judiciaire (judiciary) is a juridiction de droit commun du second degré, an appellate court of general jurisdiction. It reviews the judgments of a tribunal judiciaire. When one of the parties is not satisfied with the trial court’s judgment, the party can file an appeal. While decisions of a court of first instance are termed "jugements" in French, a court of appeals hands down an arrêt, which may either affirm or reverse the judgment of the court below. An arrêt (judgment) of the court of appeals may be further appealed en cassation. If the appeal is admissible at the cour de cassation, that court does not re-judge the facts of the matter a third time, but may investigate and verify whether the rules of law were properly applied by the lower courts.
In France, the correctional court is the court of first instance that has jurisdiction in criminal matters regarding offenses classified as délits committed by an adult. In 2013, French correctional courts rendered 576,859 judgments and pronounced 501,171 verdicts.
French criminal law is "the set of legal rules that govern the State's response to offenses and offenders". It is one of the branches of the juridical system of the French Republic. The field of criminal law is defined as a sector of French law, and is a combination of public and private law, insofar as it punishes private behavior on behalf of society as a whole. Its function is to define, categorize, prevent, and punish criminal offenses committed by a person, whether a natural person or a legal person. In this sense it is of a punitive nature, as opposed to civil law in France, which settles disputes between individuals, or administrative law which deals with issues between individuals and government.
The Maréchaussée were corps of soldiers in the armies of France initially put in charge of military policing and justice during the Middle Ages, and later extended to civilian responsibilities. They gradually coalesced into a police force with jurisdiction over the whole population on almost the entire territory of France. They retained powers of extraordinary justice until the French Revolution.
Administrative police in France are French police tasked with preventing disturbances to the ordre public. and ensuring the public peace and preventing crime. Ordre public or public peace in a society includes public tranquility, safety and well-being. Two types of ordre public exist:
French criminal procedure focuses on how individuals accused of crimes are dealt with in the French criminal justice system: how people are investigated, prosecuted, tried, and punished for an infraction defined in the penal code. These procedural issues are codified in the French code of criminal procedure. It is the procedural arm of French criminal law.
This glossary of French criminal law is a list of explanations or translations of contemporary and historical concepts of criminal law in France.
Jurisdictional dualism in France is the separation of the French court system into two separate divisions, or "ordres", as they are called in French: the ordinary courts, and the administrative courts. The ordinary courts, also known as the judiciary order, handle criminal and civil cases, while the administrative courts handle disputes between individuals and the government. This dual system allows for a clear separation of powers and specialized handling of cases related to the actions of the government. The administrative courts are headed by the Council of State, and the ordinary courts by the Court of Cassation for judiciary law.
