JULIAN DE ROSA / AFP
Nicolas Sarkozy photographed when he arrived at the Palais de Justice in December 2022 (illustration).
POLITICS – The relationship between Nicolas Sarkozy and the magistrates has never been simple. And she did not leave to arrange. The first president of the Paris Court of Appeal regretted this Friday, May 19 “personal questioning” by the former head of state of the president of the court who sentenced him on appeal in the wiretapping case.
As a reminder, the former President of the Republic was sentenced to an unprecedented three-year prison sentence, including one year to be served under an electronic bracelet, for corruption and influence peddling.
A decision that the interested party has trouble digesting, given the content of the interview he gave to Figaro. An interview in which he said that “some magistrates are in a political fight”directly implicating the bias of a judge.
“The president of the chamber who sentenced me attacked me by name in 2009 in an article in the World. Shouldn’t she have walked away, rather than judge a man she had publicly implicated so vehemently? », he said in particular about Sophie Clément, the president of the Paris Court of Appeal. Before then attacking other magistrates practicing in various cases concerning him.
“Public, persistent and personal questioning”
This did not fail to react within the judiciary. In a press release, the first president of the Paris Court of Appeal, Jacques Boulard, “deplores the personal questioning of a magistrate, by the resumption of observations that she made, almost 15 years ago, on a reform project, to discredit a court decision rendered collegially, after debates contradictory”.
#Bismuth: Questioned personally in certain media and by Nicolas Sarkozy, magistrate Sophie Clément… https://t.co/iMi4rn4oHI
— Vincent Vantighem (@vvantighem)
“As recently recalled by the Superior Council of the Judiciary”he also writes “in a democratic state governed by the rule of law, criticism of a court decision must in no case be expressed by the personal questioning of the magistrate who made the decision”.
#Bismuth: In the series “La justice fait bloc”, Peimane Galeh-Marzban, president of the court of Bobigny, publishes, at… https://t.co/3dAOYgKQSh
— Vincent Vantighem (@vvantighem)
The president of the Bobigny judicial court, Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban, for his part deplored “the public, persistent and personal questioning” of one of the investigating judges in the “Bismuth affair, currently stationed in Seine-Saint-Denis.
“A recusal motion against her was dismissed in 2015 on the grounds that the alleged bias was in no way established”recalled Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban in a press release.
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