13 DELCOURT v. BELGIUM JUDGMENT which are irrelevant to the present case, and in those instances the Procureur général’s department at the Court of Cassation is not present at the deliberations of the judges of the court. Yet it does not, however, necessarily follow from what precedes that Delcourt’s complaints are unfounded. The Court must therefore make a careful examination of the real position and functions of the Procureur général’s department attached to the Court of Cassation. 30. A series of elements allows one to understand the point of view of the Applicant and the opinion of the minority of the Commission. First, the clear distinction which must be drawn, according to the Belgian Government, between the Procureur général’s department at the Court of Cassation and the Procureur général’s department at the lower courts, does not always appear very evident from the legislative texts. The same names, such as Procureur général’s department (ministère public), are used to designate different institutions - which easily causes confusion. Moreover, the departments attached to the courts of first instance, of appeal and of cassation seem to constitute, in certain aspects, one single corps. Thus, Section 154 of the Act of 18th June 1869 (replaced recently by Article 400 of the 1967 Judicial Code) provides that the Procureur général at the Court of Cassation "shall exercise supervision over the Procureurs généraux attached to the courts of appeal", and it is only an examination of the practice which reveals that this supervision does not involve any power to intervene in the conduct of given cases but merely to give general opinions on matters of doctrine. On a superficial glance at the situation, one might go so far as to wonder if the above-mentioned distinction really reflects the true position. The Procureur général’s department at the Court of Cassation sometimes acts as the moving party: the task, for example, falls to it sometimes to institute a prosecution or disciplinary proceedings against judges (see also Article 90 of the Constitution concerning the indictment of ministers on impeachment). Furthermore, its members are sometimes recruited from among the members of the Procureur général’s department at the courts below. Therefore, some litigants may quite naturally be inclined to view as an adversary a Procureur général or an Avocat général who submits that their appeals in cassation should be dismissed. They may be all the more inclined to do so when they find themselves deprived of any real debate before the highest court because the Procureur général’s department at the Court of Appeal only very rarely makes use of the right of reply – in any event restricted - which the law confers on it in proceedings in cassation. And one may imagine that such litigants can have a feeling of inequality if, after hearing a member of the Procureur général’s department at the Court of Cassation make, in open court, final submissions unfavourable to their pleas, they see him withdraw with the judges to attend the deliberations held in the privacy of chambers.