The Court of Cassation rejected, on Friday July 28, the appeals filed by the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, against his referral to the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) for illegal taking of interests. The highest French judicial court therefore validates the referral order of the CJR’s investigating committee, which opens the way to a trial before it for the Keeper of the Seals. This hearing will be unprecedented in the history of the Fifth Republic; and its stakes, important for the majority.
Mr. Dupond-Moretti demanded that the file be returned to the investigating magistrates because of irregularities. His lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, had denounced the “procedural errors” of the CJR during its investigation, and requested the quashing of several decisions of the investigating committee, so that his client be treated as “a litigant like the others”.
Both sides expected a decision more favorable to the Minister, for example a return of the investigation file to the investigating magistrates, but the Court of Cassation largely validated the investigation, fully following the requisitions made by the Advocate General, Frédéric Desportes, during the hearing of July 7.
She explained in a press release that she had mainly canceled a seizure of documents carried out by a clerk during the July 2021 search at the ministry, but considered that even without these elements, the dismissal judgment mentioned “sufficient charges” to allow a trial.
The Keeper of the Seals, Eric Dupond-Moretti, “takes note” of the decision of the Court of Cassation and “expects with confidence to appear before the new judges of the judgment formation of the CJR”, informed the Agence France-Presse Mr. Spinosi. The hearing “will highlight the non-existence of any conflict of interest in this case,” said Mr. Spinosi, who defends the Minister of Justice with his colleague Rémi Lorrain.
Mr. Dupond-Moretti retains “all the confidence” of Elisabeth Borne
During this hearing, within a period that could be counted in months, the minister “will explain the facts of which he is accused (…) to defend his rights as any litigant”, according to his lawyers. The outcome of the trial could call into question the political future of Eric Dupond-Moretti, confirmed as Keeper of the Seals during the recent government reshuffle.
“I am first at work, you have seen it and then I will respond when the time comes, everything in its time”, reacted to the press the minister, who was visiting Pontet (Vaucluse). He also felt, the day after the support of the Minister of the Interior for the police protesting against the imprisonment of one of their colleagues, that justice “needs, like the police, respect, it needs independence , she needs to be left to work.”
Eric Dupond-Moretti, however, retains “all the confidence” of Elisabeth Borne, announced Friday Matignon, who “takes note of the decision” of the Court of Cassation. “The Keeper of the Seals is presumed innocent. The legal proceedings are continuing independently,” Matignon wrote in a message to Agence France-Presse.
The Union of Judges and the Judges’ Union had filed a complaint with the CJR in the fall of 2020 against the minister, accusing him of having used his prerogatives to settle his accounts as a lawyer, which Eric Dupond-Moretti vigorously contests. The commission of instruction of the CJR, the only jurisdiction able to prosecute and judge the ministers for acts committed in the exercise of their functions, had ordered at the beginning of October 2022 his dismissal for trial before his formation of judgment.
Patrice Spinosi had defended, during the hearing at the beginning of July, seven appeals against decisions or irregularities which would have appeared during the procedure, and an eighth against the October dismissal judgment. Throughout this judicial investigation opened at the beginning of 2021, the minister repeated that he had only “followed the recommendations of his administration” by triggering investigations against magistrates, and denounced an instruction against him from the CJR .
