Background
Mme [D] [L] was placed under formal investigation on June 2, 2026, for offenses including receiving stolen property as part of an organized group and aggravated money laundering. A liberty and detention judge ordered her held in pretrial detention.
She appealed, arguing that the record of the deferred adversarial detention hearing was invalid. She maintained that she could not read or write French fluently, needed help reviewing written material, and had been asked to sign a record that had not been read aloud to her. On June 25, 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal’s investigating chamber declined to annul the order and affirmed her detention.
The Court’s Holding
The Criminal Chamber rejected the appeal. It held that, under Article 145 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the validity of the record of an adversarial detention hearing requires no signatures other than those of the judge and the court clerk.
The Court explained that the record serves only to establish that the hearing preceding a decision to impose or extend pretrial detention complied with statutory requirements. Because the investigated person’s signature was not legally necessary, her objections concerning the circumstances in which she signed the record—including whether she could review it without assistance—could not affect its validity and were therefore legally ineffective.
Key Takeaways
- An Article 145 record of an adversarial pretrial-detention hearing is valid with the signatures of the judge and court clerk alone.
- The investigated person’s signature is not required for the record’s validity.
- A challenge based solely on the conditions under which the investigated person signed that record cannot support its annulment.
Why It Matters
The decision defines the limited evidentiary function of an Article 145 hearing record and identifies whose signatures are legally indispensable. It prevents defects associated solely with a detainee’s unnecessary signature from invalidating an otherwise compliant pretrial-detention proceeding.
The ruling does not establish that language or literacy difficulties can never affect detention proceedings. Rather, it holds that those asserted difficulties did not provide a basis for annulment here because the challenged signature was not required in the first place.