Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced Wednesday on appeal in this case to the unprecedented penalty of three years in prison, including one year to serve under electronic bracelet, for corruption and influence peddling, a first for a former president.
In an interview Thursday with Le Figaro where he again claimed his "innocence", the former president of the Republic, who has filed an appeal in cassation, said that "some magistrates are in a political fight".
"The president of the chamber that condemned me attacked me by name in 2009 in an article in Le Monde. Should she not have deported herself, rather than judge a man she had publicly implicated so vehemently?" he said in this interview about Sophie Clément, the president of the court that sentenced him, before then attacking other magistrates in other cases concerning him.
In a statement sent to the press, the first president of the Paris Court of Appeal, Jacques Boulard, "deplores the personal questioning of a magistrate, by the resumption of observations she made, nearly 15 years ago, on a reform project, to discredit a judicial decision rendered collegially, after contradictory debates".
"As the Superior Council of the Judiciary recently recalled," he also wrote, "in a democratic state governed by the rule of law, criticism of a court decision must in no case be expressed by the personal questioning of the judge who made the decision."
The president of the judicial court of Bobigny, Peimane Ghaleh-Marzban, for his part, deplored "the public, persistent and personal questioning" of one of the investigating judges of the Bismuth case, now stationed in Seine-Saint-Denis.
"A challenge against her was rejected in 2015 on the grounds that the alleged bias was in no way established," Ghaleh-Marzban said in a statement.
© 2023 AFP