The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has just been sentenced on appeal to three years in prison, including one year effective, in a phone-tapping case that has occupied the French legal scene for many months. The right-wing politician categorically contests the verdict and has announced that he would appeal to the Court of Cassation.
Nicolas Sarkozy and two other defendants—his lawyer and friend, Thierry Herzog, and former senior judge Gilbert Azibert—were convicted of ‘corruption’ and ‘influence peddling.’ The case dates back to 2013. The former head of state is accused of having sought information about a court case concerning him (the Bettencourt case), in exchange for the promise of a promotion for the magistrate involved, Gilbert Azibert. The Bettencourt affair suggested illegal financing of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign, as part of wider fraudulent procedures carried out by billionaire Lilliane Bettencourt, owner of the cosmetics company L’Oréal. Nicolas Sarkozy sought to obtain information covered by the secrecy of the investigation, and for this purpose bribed the magistrate Gilbert Azibert, then general counsel at the Court of Cassation.
Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced in the first instance in March 2021 to three years in prison, including one year effective, but appealed the verdict. The Court of Appeal has just confirmed the conviction.
The proceedings against Nicolas Sarkozy are like a game of Russian dolls, with several cases intertwined. The case in which Sarkozy is now convicted is itself the result of another investigation, concerning suspicions that the 2007 presidential campaign was financed by funds from Libya—an investigation that is merely an addition to the Bettencourt case mentioned above. As part of the investigation into Libyan funding, both of Nicolas Sarkozy’s phones had been tapped by judges, and they were these taps that revealed the small arrangements Nicolas Sarkozy was making in the Bettencourt case.
Nicolas Sarkozy confided in Le Figaro in an exclusive interview on Wednesday, May 17th. He confirms his intention to appeal to the Court of Cassation, and gives an eminently political dimension to his conviction, which he considers unfair, and targeted on his person rather than on his supposed crimes. He explains:
The essential principles of our democracy have been trampled underfoot: the confidentiality of conversations between a lawyer and his client; the reality of proof or the absence of proof; the doubt that must, in all circumstances, benefit the defence and not the prosecution; the right to an impartial justice that would rule on what I did or did not do, and not on what I am.
He continues to claim his innocence and believes that the judiciary was keen to bring him down mainly for political reasons. The key to his argument lies in the fact that the trial used conversations that were supposed to be confidential between Nicolas Sarkozy and his lawyer, even though the case law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) has repeatedly recalled the unopposable character of tapping conversations between a lawyer and his client. There is a question of law here which, according to him, justifies recourse to the Court of Cassation, which has the power to ‘overturn’ judgments or not.
Nicolas Sarkozy is currently at the heart of judicial turmoil. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office has just requested last week his referral to the criminal court in the so-called Libyan financing of his presidential campaigns. Here again, the former president of the Republic denies the facts and considers that “the file is empty.”
For Hervé Lehman, a former investigating judge and lawyer at the Paris bar, interviewed by Le Figaro, the Sarkozy affair gives an extremely degraded image of French justice, but also of French political life.
For the moment, the sentence pronounced against Nicolas Sarkozy is not expected to be executed. Indeed, it is suspended until the Court of Cassation, France’s highest legal body, has given its opinion. If the Court of Cassation rejects his appeal, Sarkozy will have the possibility to appeal to the ECHR.
