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In October last year, an inflatable dinghy carrying an estimated total of 60-70 migrants left the north-east French coast hoping to cross the Channel to England. But shortly after leaving it took on water and sank. While 48 people on board were saved by French rescue services, an official toll announced three others died. But in reality, at least a dozen more people went missing. Thirteen bodies were soon found on French beaches and in the water but now, one year on, nine of them have still not been identified, despite the cooperation of families of the disappeared.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who on Tuesday began serving a five-year prison term for criminal conspiracy to gain funding for his 2007 election campaign from the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is receiving 24-hour protection by two armed police officers occupying a neighbouring cell at La Santé prison in Paris, it has been revealed. Michel Deléan reports on the controversial and unprecedented measure. 

At just before 9.40am on October 21st Nicolas Sarkozy entered the gates of La Santé prison in Paris to begin the five-year jail term he was given after being found guilty of criminal conspiracy in the Libyan election funding scandal, a first for a former French president. But current president Emmanuel Macron received Sarkozy at the Élysée while justice minister Gérald Darmanin has said he will visit him in prison. And French business groups Accor and Lagardère groups have rallied to his support, while television channels have largely glossed over the seriousness of the offences. As Fabrice Arfi argues in this op-ed article, the jailing of Nicolas Sarkozy lays bare, as never before, the panic of a small but powerful elite that desires nothing less than the return of pre-French Revolution privilege.

A meticulous study into Russian losses in Ukraine published this month by exiled Russian media outlets reports that since the Kremlin launched what it called a “special military operation” against its neighbour in February 2022, the number of deaths it was able to verify among the Russian military amount to 135,000. But it also estimates the probable number of Russian fatalities over the same period at 219,000. Justine Brabant reports.

A group of 16 prominent organisations active in the defence of human rights in general, and those of migrants in particular, have launched a legal challenge in France against the so-called “one in, one out” treaty agreed this summer between London and Paris for the return to France of migrants arriving illegally in England by small boats crossing the Channel. The challenge is a submission before the France’s Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, which argues that the application of the treaty in France is in contravention of the constitution, and notably because it was never ratified by parliament. Nejma Brahim reports.

French President Emmanuel Macron has reappointed his close ally Sébastien Lecornu as prime minister, just five days after the latter resigned from the post. The future of his minority government, the fourth since the results of snap parliamentary elections called by Macron last year, already seems seriously compromised, with a no-confidence vote already expected in prliament. In this op-ed piece, Mediapart political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani argues that Macron’s dogged determination to repeatedly establish a government in his political image, to the exclusion of the leftwing alliance which emerged victorious in last year’s election, is leading France to the cliff face, and that even his own camp are questioning his intransigent behaviour.

In an interview with Mediapart, former Israeli prime minister and ex-chief of general staff of the country's military, Ehud Barak, details his view of the so-called Trump plan for an end to the war in Gaza, argues why Benjamin Netanyahu must go, why both sides in the conflict must compromise, and why the only conclusion to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in a two-state solution.

In July 1985, the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior was bombed and sunk in the New Zealand port of Aukland, when one of the NGO’s photographers was drowned, in an operation by France's forein intelligence agency, the DGSE, to prevent Greenpeace from campaigning against French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. Paris vehemently denied involvement, but was eventually forced to admit responsibility for the attack. Mediapart co-founder Edwy Plenel, who at the time worked for French daily Le Monde, whose revelations forced the resignations of the DGSE boss and his defence minister, reports here how the principal culprit, then French president François Mitterrand, got away with his crime.

The verdicts and sentences were announced on Thursday at the end of the trial of Nicolas Sarkozy and 11 co-defendants over their roles in the alleged funding of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential election bid by the Libyan regime of Muammar Gaddafi. The ten-year judicial investigation, and Mediapart’s own investigations over a period of 14 years, have seen ups and downs along the way, and here and there some surprising outcomes. Graham Tearse looks back on the different developments and how the “Gaddafi-Sarkozy funding affair” became an epic legal marathon.