The highest court of the French judiciary on Wednesday rejected the appeal of former President Nicolas Sarkozy for corruption and influence peddling, making definitive his sentence to one year in prison under an electronic bracelet, an unprecedented sanction for a former head of state in France.
Until now suspended, this sentence, to which is added three years of ineligibility, is now applicable: Mr. Sarkozy, 69 years old, will be summoned before a sentence enforcement judge who will have to determine the terms of his bracelet electronic.
Nicolas Sarkozy “will obviously comply with the sanction pronounced which is now final”, commented to AFP his lawyer, Me Patrice Spinosi.
But “at the same time, in the coming weeks he will refer the matter to the European Court (of Human Rights, ECHR), as he is now entitled to do, to obtain the guarantee of rights that the French judges have denied him,” he announced.
This referral does not prevent the execution of the sanctions imposed.
This final sentence pronounced by the Court of Cassation comes as the former tenant of the Élysée Palace must appear from January 6, and for four months, in Paris, in a case of suspicion of Libyan financing of his presidential campaign from 2007.
In the case decided on Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted at first instance on March 1, 2021, then on appeal on May 17, 2023.
“Corruption pact”
The former head of state was each time found guilty of having entered into a “corruption pact” with Gilbert Azibert, senior magistrate at the Court of Cassation, in 2014, alongside his historic lawyer Thierry Herzog. And this, in exchange for a “help” promised to the latter for an honorary position in Monaco.
The objective: for Mr. Azibert to transmit information and try to influence an appeal filed by Nicolas Sarkozy in the Bettencourt affair — a case of donations granted to the right-wing UMP party by the extremely wealthy heiress of the L’Oréal group Liliane Bettencourt (died in 2017) and in which the courts have since dropped the charges.
MM. Sarkozy, Azibert and Herzog were given the same sentence, with the lawyer banned from wearing the black dress for three years.
Claiming their innocence from the start, they filed appeals, raising 20 arguments examined during a hearing on November 6, after which the decision was reserved until this Wednesday.
Before the Court of Cassation, which controls the proper application of the law and not the merits of the cases, the Advocate General methodically recommended the rejection of each point of law raised.
Me Emmanuel Piwnica, lawyer on the advice of Thierry Herzog, had criticized a procedure which “should never have seen the light of day”, speaking of a case where “we no longer count the illegalities committed, the breaches, the attacks on rights fundamentals”.
The lawyers contested in particular the legality of the wiretapping at the heart of the case, a subject already debated many times in this case.
Me Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for the former president, invoked a ruling of the ECHR of June 16, 2016: “Nicolas Sarkozy cannot be criminally convicted on the basis of exchanges he had with his lawyer”, because they cannot be “used against him,” he argued.
In 2025, the Court of Cassation will also have to rule on Nicolas Sarkozy’s appeal against his sentence to one year in prison, including six months, for excessive spending during his campaign for the lost presidential election of 2012.
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