French justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti faces an investigation by judges over claims of an unlawful conflict of interest involving his actions as a government minister.
Dupond-Moretti, who was appointed a year ago in July 2020, was placed under formal investigation on Friday July 16th after being questioned for several hours by investigating judges from the Cour de Justice de la République (CJR), the only court that can handle alleged offences committed in the course of a minister's duties.
It is the first time in the history of the French Republic that a serving justice minister has been placed under formal investigation, a move in French law which is one step short of charges being brought.
Éric Dupond-Moretti is accused of having used administrative and disciplinary procedures at the Ministry of Justice last year with the sole purpose of settling scores with anti-corruption prosecutors and a judge with whom he had been in conflict when he was practising as a lawyer.
The minister, whose lawyers deny there was any criminal behaviour, benefits from the presumption of innocence in the case.
The proceedings against Dupond-Moretti relate directly to the way he carries out his duties as a minister and are bound to raise questions as to whether he should remain in office during the investigation. Yet he is supported by President Emmanuel Macron and there seems no immediate sign of him resigning. His lawyers have also insisted he is intending to stay in post.
According to the news channel BFMTV, President Macron even showed explicit support for his minister at the last meeting of government ministers on Wednesday July 14th, stating: “The justice system is an authority not a power. I won't let the justice system become a power.”
Prime minister Jean Castex meanwhile issued a statement reiterating his “complete confidence” in Éric Dupond-Moretti after news of the formal investigation into the justice minister was made public.
The case began in July 2020. Éric Dupond-Moretti had just been named justice minister by Emmanuel Macron and the high-profile lawyer - and sometime actor – decided to start administrative proceedings against three prosecutors from France's financial crimes prosecution unit the Parquet National financier (PNF). The trio had been involved in a preliminary investigation to identity the mole who had been tipping off former president Nicolas Sarkozy about the phone-tapping case against him. During that probe investigators had looked at the phone records of several lawyers - including Éric Dupond-Moretti.
In June 2020, when he was still a lawyer, Éric Dupond-Moretti had reacted angrily to media revelations about the examination of phone records and attacked what he called a “spook-style” investigation by the PNF. This was just a few days before he was appointed justice minister. It was soon after taking up his new post that he launched the administrative inquiry into the matter, targeting the three PNF prosecutors by name in a statement. This was despite the fact that the reasons for bringing such proceedings seemed debatable; a preliminary report into the case had already indicated that no faults had been committed.
The conflict of interest appeared even more blatant given that a few days earlier the minister had featured in the columns of Paris Match magazine holidaying with his friend Thierry Herzog. The latter is Nicolas Sarkozy's lawyer and one of the former president's co-accused in the phone-tapping case, in which the prosecution was brought by the PNF – the very organisation targeted by Éric Dupond-Moretti.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Meanwhile, and as Mediapart revealed, the justice minister started a second administrative probe against another figure involved in the fight against corruption, Judge Édouard Levrault. It was on July 31st 2020 that the minister decided to begin pre-disciplinary proceedings against Judge Levrault, even though as a lawyer Dupond-Moretti had publicly criticised the judge, referring to him as a “cowboy” in the press, and one of his clients had made a formal complaint against him.
Éric Dupond-Moretti had criticised the judge – who is today based in Nice – after the latter had spoken on television about a sensitive investigation that he had carried out as an examining magistrate in Monaco, a position from which he was unceremoniously moved in June 2019.
During his time in the principality Édouard Levrault was in charge of an explosive corruption case targeting the influential Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, owner of AS Monaco football club and reportedly close to Monaco's ruler Prince Albert. The judge's investigation had shown the incestuous links between Rybolovlev and several senior Monaco public officials, who were suspected of colluding with the oligarch in his legal battle with art dealer Yves Bouvier (see Mediapart's articles here, here and here).
Whether in relation to the PNF or Judge Levrault, Éric Dupond-Moretti is therefore suspected of having used his position as a minister to attack via disciplinary hearings those judges or prosecutors with whom he was at odds while a lawyer. In short, he is suspected of blurring the lines between public and private in a way worthy of a banana republic.
The situation sparked unprecedented anger among judges and prosecutors, and motions condemning the minister were signed in large numbers in every court in the land.
The two main unions representing magistrates – judges and prosecutors - the USM and SM, as well as the anti-corruption body ANTICOR, later filed a formal criminal complaint against Éric Dupond-Moretti to the Cour de Justice de la République, accusing him of having an “unlawful conflict of interest”.
Very unusually, several senior French judicial figures, including the prosecutor general at top appeal court the Cour de Cassation, François Molins, have also spoken publicly to criticise the attacks on judicial independence by the justice system's own minister.
Today, supporters of Éric Dupond-Moretti seek to claim, employing a form of rhetorical judo, that given his position is formally linked to that of the CJR, then François Molins himself has a conflict of interest. Yet in fact the role of the prosecutor general at the Cour de Cassation in this case is limited for the time being to referring the case to the CJR's committee of investigating judges – a committee in which he does not participate. That happened after the applications committee at the CJR – which the prosecutor general is not involved in either – had said that the complaints lodged by the unions and ANTICOR were admissible.
The minister has always denied any conflict of interest in the case, though the definition of the offence is clear. According to legislation dating from October 11th 2013 on transparency in public life, a conflict of interest involves “any situation of overlap between a public interest and public or private interests which is of a character as to influence or appear to influence the independent, impartial and objective exercise of a position”.
Following the emotion aroused by the minister's actions the government ultimately issued a decree on October 23rd 2020 which was signed by both prime minister Jean Castex and Éric Dupond-Moretti. Published the next day in the government's Journal Officiel, the decree “from now on forbids Éric Dupond-Moretti knowing about actions of any nature … that relate to the questioning of a magistrate's behaviour in cases involving parties for whom he was the lawyer or in which he was involved”.
Yet rather than calm the situation, the prime minister is now involving himself in the plot that was started a few months earlier by his justice minister. For though new reports by the judicial inspectorate cleared the PNF prosecutors of any ethical transgressions in the phone-tapping case, Jean Castex has nonetheless referred the same magistrates targeted by Éric Dupond-Moretti to the judicial authority the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature (CSM) for possible disciplinary proceedings.
Emails between Jean Castex's office and the judicial inspectorate, the Inspection de la Justice, which were recently revealed by Mediapart, show that the prime minister's team were clearly ready to do all they could to pursue the case against the prosecutors. Among them is prosecutor Patrice Amar, a bête noire of Nicolas Sarkozy, under whose presidency Jean Castex served as assistant chief of staff at the Élysée.
Jean-François Beynel, the head of the Inspection de la Justice, was firm in his response to the prime minister's office. “Mr Amar is indeed a magistrate who appears stubborn and persistent in the way he deals with financial disputes, so does this mean one can speak about a lack of ethics?” he asked.
On Friday July 16th Libération newspaper revealed evidence given by the former secretary general at the PNF, Jean-Marc Toublanc. He saw the government's actions as “proof of a desire to harm and intimidate not only those who are the object of this administrative investigation but also all magistrates who have sacrificed themselves for so many years to the fight against economic and financial criminality”.
According to him, the independence of the justice system “is in danger in the current circumstances”; in other words, with Éric Dupond-Moretti at the helm.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter