Paris (AFP)

The former Minister of Justice Jean-Jacques Urvoas appeared on Tuesday, for a week, before the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR), court suspended, for transmitting the deputy Thierry Solere information on an investigation that targeted him.

After Christine Lagarde or Charles Pasqua, he is the eighth minister to appear since 1999 before this controversial court that the executive wants to see disappear but who, today, remains only qualified to judge acts committed by members of the government in the exercise of their functions.

During the investigation, the former Socialist Minister (January 2016-May 2017) acknowledged "the materiality of the facts" but contests that the documents transmitted are covered "by any secret".

It will be up to the RGC, composed of twelve parliamentarians and three judges of the Court of Cassation, to decide the thorny question of the perimeter of secrecy and the obligations of the minister in this area.

The former president of the National Assembly's Committee on the Law incurs a maximum sentence of one year imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 euros.

Appreciated for his skill and his sense of listening in Parliament as in the ministry, Jean-Jacques Urvoas, 60 years old, saw his image of rigor damaged by this affair, which caught up with him while, beaten in the legislative elections of 2017, he had just returned to a teaching position in public law at the university.

The case, which had led magistrates and politicians to demand a reform to settle definitively the hierarchical link between the chancery and the prosecutor's office, had been tied up in the last days of the presidency of François Hollande.

- Sheets and Telegram -

On May 4, 2017, Jean-Jacques Urvoas is about to leave the Place Vendome when he sends a document of the ministry to Thierry Solère, then elected opposition LR, via encrypted Telegram messaging.

This is a "public action sheet" prepared by the Department of Criminal Affairs and Pardons (DACG), sensitive department that is the interface between the Ministry of Justice and prosecutors. This fact sheet reports on the state of investigation of the Nanterre public prosecutor's office for tax evasion and trading in influence, which involves Mr. Solère since September 2016.

The next day, the Minister sends another e-mail update of this file to the Member of Parliament for Hauts-de-Seine.

These two communications will be discovered six months later by the investigators during a search of the home of Thierry Solère, then revealed by the Chained Duck.

On June 20, 2018, Jean-Jacques Urvoas is indicted for "violation of secrecy" by the board of inquiry of the RGC.

His lawyer Me Emmanuel Marsigny argues that the Keeper of the Seals does not participate in the investigation, it was "not subject to any secret as to the information developed by the services of the Ministry, reported by the prosecution".

In his opinion, the "public action sheets" could not contain "any information protected under a secret provided for by law".

An opinion that does not share the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation, François Molins, who asked in December 2018 the holding of the trial. "The Keeper of the Seals holds this secrecy because of his duties and as the superior superior of the prosecution," he said in a statement.

The prosecutor considers that "the return to the custody of the Seals of information covered by the secret (...) could in no case authorize him to inform" the principal involved in an ongoing investigation concerning him.

And even if "the information thus transmitted does not seem to have hindered the investigation", as noted by the commission d'instruction.

The Nanterroise investigation, which led Mr. Solère, who has since joined LREM, to step down at the end of 2017 as Quaestor of the National Assembly, was assigned to an examining magistrate on 1 February.

Several witnesses, ranging from the former chief of staff of Mr. Urvoas to the DACG officials, have expressed their surprise or even a sense of "betrayal" by learning the transmission to a respondent of elements of investigation concerning him.

"If it was transmitted to me, it is that I could use it", argued the former minister during the investigation, adding that his goal was to avoid that Thierry Solère - who denounced a "hunt for "man" - "attacks the judicial institution".

© 2019 AFP