PNF, PNACO, JIRS, PNAT: a guide to France’s specialised criminal prosecution offices and courts

Over the past twenty years, the legislature has kept adding layers. Law No. 2004-204 of 9 March 2004, known as the “Perben II” Act, established the Juridictions Interrégionales Spécialisées (JIRS, interregional specialised courts). Law No. 2013-1117 of 6 December 2013, in the wake of the Cahuzac affair, created the Parquet National Financier (PNF, National Financial Prosecutor’s Office). Law No. 2019-222 of 23 March 2019 on the 2018-2022 programming and reform of the justice system established the Parquet National Antiterroriste (PNAT, National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office). More recently, Law No. 2025-532 of 13 June 2025 aimed at freeing France from the trap of drug trafficking brought into being the Parquet National Anti-Criminalité Organisée (PNACO, National Organised-Crime Prosecutor’s Office), operational since 5 January 2026. Four structures, four fields of jurisdiction that are partially overlapping. The resulting edifice is dense, and its clarity is not always self-evident, including for practitioners.

The JIRS, the matrix of specialisation

The first building block of this architecture, the JIRS answer a simple intuition on the part of the 2004 legislature: to deal, through dedicated means, with organised crime whose complexity exceeded the capacity of the ordinary courts. Eight JIRS now cover French territory (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, Rennes, Bordeaux, Nancy and Fort-de-France), in accordance with Articles 706-75 et seq. of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Their jurisdiction covers organised delinquency and crime presenting a high degree of complexity: drug trafficking committed by an organised group, theft and extortion, aggravated procuring, money laundering, and criminal conspiracy (association de malfaiteurs) with a view to preparing a serious crime. Twenty years of practice have shaped a dense body of case law, marked by lengthy investigations, intrusive techniques and files that are sometimes of a staggering scale. A significant proportion of nullity issues crystallise here, whether relating to the regularity of special investigative techniques or to the derogatory police-custody (garde à vue) regime provided for in Article 706-88 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

By way of illustration, and applying Decision No. 2014-420/421 QPC of 9 October 2014, by which the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) held the provisions of Article 706-73(8° bis) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which classified organised fraud among the offences giving rise to the derogatory police-custody regime, to be contrary to the Constitution, the Criminal Division of the Cour de cassation (French Court of Cassation) held that the provisions of Article 706-88 of the Code of Criminal Procedure no longer applied to such conduct, whilst upholding the validity of measures taken prior to the publication of the declaration of unconstitutionality (Cass. crim., 19 January 2016, No. 15-81.041). The assessment of the regularity of an extended period of police custody therefore depends on the classification adopted and the date of the act being challenged, within a normative environment that legislative and constitutional developments continue to reshape.

The PNF

The creation of the PNF by Law No. 2013-1117 of 6 December 2013 came about in a fraught context, in the wake of the Cahuzac affair and the work of the Nadal commission on public confidence in the justice system. The legislature sought to concentrate, within a national structure placed under the authority of the procureur général (Principal Public Prosecutor) attached to the Paris Court of Appeal (Articles 705 to 705-4 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), economic and financial cases of exceptional scale.

Its subject-matter jurisdiction extends to offences against probity (domestic corruption or the corruption of foreign public officials, unlawful taking of interest, influence peddling, favouritism, and misappropriation of public funds), to aggravated tax fraud and its laundering, to breaches of and offences under securities-market regulation (insider dealing, market manipulation, and the dissemination of false or misleading information), and to VAT fraud committed by an organised group. The decisive criterion for attracting jurisdiction remains the high complexity of the case, assessed by reference to the number of persons implicated, the sums involved, the international dimension, or the technical nature of the offences.

The PNF’s caseload is varied. It includes cases with a political-financial dimension, which make up its most visible share, as well as purely industrial, banking or stock-market matters, where the political dimension is absent but where the complexity, the sums involved, or the cross-border dimension justify centralisation in Paris. Alongside proceedings against public figures, its docket therefore includes cases of foreign public official corruption involving industrial groups, securities-market breaches implicating listed companies, and aggravated tax fraud cases targeting banks and wealthy taxpayers.

Specialisation does not stop at the prosecutor’s office. At the trial stage, cases originating from the PNF are, in practice, listed before the tribunal judiciaire de Paris (Paris First Instance Court) (Article 705 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), and more specifically before its 32nd Criminal Division (32ème chambre correctionnelle), which, under the internal organisation of the Paris court, is dedicated exclusively to complex economic and financial cases. This organisational concentration brings together the technical expertise required (tax law, securities-market law, accountancy, cross-border litigation) and fosters a consistency in case law that would have been difficult to achieve had these cases been spread across the ordinary criminal divisions. A decade of activity has placed the 32nd Division at the heart of French business-criminal litigation, whether in proceedings against public figures, starting with the Cahuzac affair which precipitated the creation of the PNF, or in the approval of judicial public-interest agreements concluded with leading industrial and banking groups (Airbus, HSBC Private Bank, Google, Société Générale, Bolloré and McDonald’s France).

As regards the convention judiciaire d’intérêt public (CJIP) (judicial public-interest agreement), introduced by Law No. 2016-1691 of 9 December 2016, known as the “Sapin II” Act, it should be recalled that it is not the exclusive preserve of the PNF. The procedure, codified in Article 41-1-2 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, is open to any public prosecutor (procureur de la République). Its use has gradually spread to territorial prosecution offices, in particular since the mechanism was extended to environmental offences by Law No. 2020-1672 of 24 December 2020 on the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, environmental justice and specialised criminal justice. The PNF nonetheless remains its longest-standing and most visible user, owing to the scale of the cases it handles. This negotiated procedure, which averts trial for corporate entities in exchange for a public-interest fine and a compliance programme conducted under the supervision of the Agence française anticorruption (French Anti-Corruption Agency), has seen growing use and has generated extensive academic debate.

Case law itself has begun to define the interplay between the CJIP and parallel proceedings. Ruling by reference to the preliminary article and Articles 180-1 and 495-14 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, together with Article 6 § 2 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the Criminal Division held, for the first time, that where a procedure of comparution sur reconnaissance préalable de culpabilité (guilty-plea hearing, CRPC) conducted in parallel against a natural person has failed, the request or agreement of the person placed under formal investigation seeking referral to a CRPC hearing, together with any documents or references to documents relating to it, must be removed from the judicial investigation file, even where a CJIP concluded with a corporate entity has been approved (Cass. crim., 29 November 2023, No. 23-81.825, FS-B). The judgment illustrates the friction that this negotiated procedure can generate, within PNF litigation, with the presumption of innocence of co-defendants prosecuted before the 32nd Criminal Division.

For the defence, involvement in a PNF case calls upon expertise in tax, accounting and securities-market matters. It also demands a detailed knowledge of the practices of the 32nd Division: the pace of hearings, the management of voluminous case files, and the place given to technical argument. The prospect of a CJIP, where available, constitutes a leading strategic lever for corporate entities. The choice is never straightforward: between settlement and trial, between a negotiated penalty and the risk of judicial proceedings, between the reputational clarity of the agreement and the implicit acknowledgement of the facts, counsel and client decide on a case-by-case basis.

The PNAT

Created by Law No. 2019-222 of 23 March 2019 on the 2018-2022 programming and reform of the justice system, the PNAT has exercised, since 1 July 2019, exclusive jurisdiction over acts of terrorism (Article 421-1 et seq. of the Criminal Code), crimes against humanity (Article 211-1 et seq. of the Criminal Code), war crimes (Article 461-1 et seq. of the Criminal Code), the crime of genocide, and enforced disappearances. Its distinguishing feature lies in the derogatory regime that applies to these classifications: police custody extended up to 96 hours, or even 144 hours in certain cases (Article 706-88 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), night-time searches, and extended security measures.

This derogatory regime is closely monitored by the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council) and by the European Court of Human Rights. Constitutional review came into play during the examination of the Act of 23 March 2019, from which the PNAT originates: the Conseil constitutionnel then found a partial non-conformity, accompanied by several interpretative reservations (Cons. const., 21 March 2019, No. 2019-778 DC). More recently, on a referral from the Association des avocats pénalistes (French Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers), the Council held Article 63-5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, concerning the conditions under which police custody is carried out, to be compatible with the Constitution, subject to the proviso that, where the conditions of the measure infringe upon the dignity of the person, the competent magistrate must immediately take any measure enabling this to be brought to an end or, failing that, order the release of the person concerned (Cons. const., 6 October 2023, No. 2023-1064 QPC, para. 22). This reservation applies across the board, to any period of police custody, including those subject to the derogatory regime under Articles 706-88 and 706-88-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Defending a case before the PNAT requires a command of Convention standards (Articles 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights foremost among them) and sustained procedural vigilance. Notification of rights, the effective assistance of counsel, access to the case file: the case law is evolving rapidly on each of these points. Every procedural step may carry lasting consequences for the situation of the person under investigation: pre-trial detention (détention provisoire), judicial supervision (contrôle judiciaire), and post-sentence security measures.

The PNACO

The PNACO is the latest layer in this architecture. Established by Law No. 2025-532 of 13 June 2025 aimed at freeing France from the trap of drug trafficking, and operational since 5 January 2026, it partly succeeds the JUNALCO (France’s former national jurisdiction against organised crime), previously based at the tribunal judiciaire de Paris. Its jurisdiction covers organised crime of very high complexity, going beyond the scope of the JIRS: international drug trafficking, arms trafficking committed by an organised group, large-scale money laundering, organised cybercrime, and environmental offences committed by an organised group.

The interplay between the PNACO, the JIRS and territorial prosecution offices raises questions of jurisdiction that, to date, have not all been settled. The concurrent jurisdiction arrangement, as organised by Article 706-75 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and related provisions, leaves a margin of discretion to the procureur général, the scope of which has yet to be refined. As practice becomes settled, the defence will need systematically to examine the regularity of a case’s attachment to the specialised jurisdiction, and to make use of jurisdictional challenges (incident de compétence) or nullity applications (requête en nullité). The first months of application still leave significant grey areas.

Guidance for the defence

Whichever prosecution office is seized of the matter, defending a case before these structures shares a number of constants.

Counsel must become involved from the investigative stage onwards: economic or organised-crime police custody, often extended, is a decisive moment for the defence; for the practical reflexes to adopt at this stage, see our article on the twelve reflexes to adopt in economic and financial police custody. Nullity issues centre on the regularity of intrusive measures and special investigative techniques, an area in which keeping abreast of the latest case-law developments is essential. Many cases have an international dimension, which requires coordination with foreign counsel and a command of mutual legal assistance, European arrest warrants and extradition procedures. Finally, the media environment surrounding these cases requires a carefully managed interplay between criminal defence and reputational management, without any confusion of roles.

The defence must also anticipate peripheral proceedings: tax proceedings, administrative recovery actions, disciplinary or professional-body sanctions, and civil claims. Strategic coherence across these different proceedings is often the decisive factor in the outcome of the case.

This layering therefore remains the state of the law. Practitioners work with it as it stands. And the debate on rationalising this architecture, which began in the early 2010s, has yet to reach its conclusion.