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France’s highest court upheld a corruption conviction against former president Nicolas Sarkozy, dismissing his appeal.
Wednesday’s ruling by the Court of Cassation means Sarkozy, who was in power from 2007 to 2012, will now have to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for a year.
Sarkozy, 69, reacted by saying he was unwilling to accept “the profound injustice” and would now appeal to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the verdict.
He was originally sentenced to three years in prison in 2021, but two of those years were suspended and the third converted to electronic monitoring instead of prison.
Sarkozy was convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, after he had left office, by suggesting he could get him a prestigious job in exchange for information about a separate case.
In the 2021 sentencing, Judge Christine Mée stated that the conservative politician “knew that what he was doing was wrong”, adding that his actions and those of his lawyer had given the public “a very poor image of justice”.
The crimes were classified as influence peddling and violation of professional secrecy.
Following Wednesday’s verdict by the Court of Cassation, Sarkozy’s lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, said his client would comply with the terms of the sentence.
Sarkozy has exhausted all his legal options in France, and his planned appeal to the European Court of Human Rights will not delay the execution of the verdict.
The 2021 conviction was a legal milestone for post-war France.
The only precedent was the trial of Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, who received a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for arranging bogus jobs at Paris city hall for his allies when he was mayor of Paris. Chirac died in 2019.
