The case of a French man called for jury selection for his own trial

The French judicial system is a notoriously cumbersome creature and of course, as in many other countries, has been is prone to making mistakes, or at least taking a heck of a long time in admitting to, and then correcting them.

Take the case of Loïc Sécher, sentenced to 16 years for a crime he never committed, according to post-trial testimony by the victim.

Or Marc Machin, who spent six years in prison for a murder perpetrated by someone else.

Or Antonio Madeira, a man wrongly found guilty of raping his daughter, Virginie, and after serving six years was released - conditionally. He's still "guilty" in the eyes of the law even though in 2006 Virginie not only retracted her accusations, but published a book "J'ai menti" ("I lied") in which she admitted that she had made the whole story up.

And then of course there was the infamous Outreau child abuse trial, arguably one of France's biggest miscarriages of justice.

There's general agreement among political parties that the French justice system need overhauling, but reform is hard and appears to be in its own right a long and painful process.

Whatever eventually gets through parliament, let's hope it ensures that cases such as those mentioned (and many others of course) won't happen again, and that it can also avoid the administrative mix-up that occurred before the recent trial of a 66-year-old man in the town of Parthenay in western France.

He was accused of sexually molesting a boy between 1994 and 1996 - a charge to which he admitted after the victim revealed what had happened in 2006.

Yes those proverbial "wheels of justice" grind just as slowly here in France as anywhere else.

The trial was set to begin on December 10, but first a jury had to be chosen.

And among those called for selection on November 30...yes you see where this is going don't you, especially as the title has rather given it away...was the accused.

Not surprisingly, he ignored the summons and was fined €150 for not appearing for selection; a sum that was eventually lifted after the court realised the error it had made.

It might not be a tale on the scale of the miscarriages of justice that have continued to plague the system over the years, but perhaps it's an indication that something is not quite right even at the very core of the process itself.

Just a thought.