The Constitutional Council on Friday rejected a priority question of constitutionality (QPC) on the system of searches in ministries, raised by the defense of Eric Dupond-Moretti on the subject of accusations of illegal taking of interests which target him, judging it ” inoperative”. Lawyers for the Keeper of the Seals, under threat of a lawsuit before the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), considered that French law, which does not provide for any particular restriction during searches in a ministry, violated the principle of separation between the executive power and the judiciary.
But the guarantor of the constitutionality of the laws recalls that this principle, which governs the institutions, is not as such “a right or a freedom that the Constitution guarantees” to litigants and cannot therefore be the subject of a QPC. Also, he “dismisses it as inoperative”, specifies his decision published on Friday.
“Institutional Imbalance”
“The Council refuses to recognize a constitutional value in the independence of the executive power when the parliamentary power as the judicial power benefit from special regimes with regard to searches”, regretted to AFP Patrice Spinosi, counsel for Eric Dupond. -Moretti, seeing it as an “institutional imbalance”.
At the hearing, on April 11, the lawyer recalled that the Constitutional Council had recognized in 2015, in connection with a search in a court, that the fact that the code of criminal procedure does not specify “under what conditions a element covered by the secrecy of the deliberation can be seized” was contrary to the “principle of independence of the courts”.
Illegal taking of interest
Drawing a parallel between the two situations, he was moved “that magistrates, even members of the CJR, could seize and take cognizance of confidential documents apprehended indiscriminately, in the absence of any specific control”, seeing in it a “risk instrumentalization of judicial proceedings” for political purposes.
The disputed search took place at the Chancellery on July 1, 2021, in a judicial investigation for illegal taking of interests targeting Eric Dupond-Moretti, accused of having taken advantage of his function as minister to settle accounts with magistrates to whom he is was opposed when he was a lawyer. The Minister has lodged eight appeals in this procedure, and in particular against the decision rendered in October by the CJR ordering that he be tried. The Court of Cassation should examine them in the coming months.