France’s justice minister was ordered on Monday to stand trial in a conflict-of-interest case, a first for a sitting justice minister and a potential embarrassment for President Emmanuel Macron, who rose to power on a promise to tighten ethical standards in French politics, reports The New York Times.
A former star criminal lawyer, Éric Dupond-Moretti was named justice minister in July 2020. Only weeks after his appointment, he opened investigations of judges with whom he had clashed as a lawyer, prompting accusations that he had abused his position to settle scores.
The offense Mr. Dupond-Moretti is accused of is punishable by five years’ imprisonment and a fine of half a million euros, or about $490,000. Mr. Dupond-Moretti’s lawyers said on Monday that they had lodged an appeal to block the trial from taking place.
Christophe Ingrain, one of the lawyers, said there was “no reason for him to resign” from his position as minister, portraying the trial as an attack from a judiciary with whom Mr. Dupond-Moretti has long had notoriously difficult relations.
“Éric Dupond-Moretti will not give in,” Mr. Ingrain told BFM TV on Monday. “His legitimacy does not come from the magistrates’ unions; it comes from the president of the Republic and the prime minister.”
Complaints filed in late 2020 by judges’ unions and the anticorruption group Anticor led to an investigation of Mr. Dupond-Moretti last year that looked at two incidents.
The first was a disciplinary inquiry Mr. Dupond-Moretti started against three magistrates of the national financial prosecutor’s office, after a number of flaws were identified in an investigation they were conducting.
The three judges had ordered the police to pore over Mr. Dupond-Moretti’s phone records when he was still a lawyer, in an effort to determine the identity of a possible mole in an illegal campaign financing case against former President Nicolas Sarkozy.