The Court of Cassation of France, the highest French jurisdiction, rejected on Wednesday the appeal of former French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, for corruption and influence peddling.
Thus, he has been definitively sentenced to one year of electronic monitoring with the help of an ankle bracelet, a first for a former French head of state, AFP reports.
This sentence, which had been suspended until the decision of the Court of Cassation, is now applicable, so Sarkozy will be summoned before a judge who will determine the terms of wearing the electronic bracelet.
Nicolas Sarkozy "will obviously comply with the pronounced sanction, which is now final," his lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, stated to AFP.
However, "in parallel, in the coming weeks, he will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), as he is now entitled to do so, to ensure the rights that French judges have denied him," the lawyer added.
This final conviction pronounced by the Court of Cassation comes just before Sarkozy is set to appear, starting from January 6 and for four months, in Paris, in a case of suspicions of Libyan financing of his 2007 presidential campaign.
In the case settled on Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy was convicted in the first instance on March 1, 2021, and then on appeal on May 17, 2023, including a 3-year ban on running for office.
Each time, the former president was found guilty of entering into a "corruption pact" in 2014 with his then-lawyer, Thierry Herzog, and Gilbert Azibert, a senior judge at the Court of Cassation, in exchange for an honorary position in Monaco.
The purpose was for Azibert to pass on information and attempt to influence in the case of an appeal made by Sarkozy in the Bettencourt affair, involving donations to the right-wing UMP party by the heiress of the L'Oréal group, Liliane Bettencourt (who passed away in 2017), a case in which the prosecution has since been dropped.
Maintaining his innocence from the beginning, Sarkozy, Herzog, and Azibert appealed, which the Court of Cassation ruled on Wednesday.
Before this Court, which oversees the correct application of the law and not the substance of the cases, the lawyers mainly contested the legality of the wiretaps at the center of the case.
Lawyer Patrice Spinosi invoked a decision of the ECHR from June 16, 2016, arguing that "Nicolas Sarkozy cannot be criminally convicted based on conversations he had with his lawyer," as these cannot be "used against him."
In 2025, the Court of Cassation will rule on Sarkozy's appeal against his one-year prison sentence, six months of which are to be served, for excessive spending in the lost 2012 presidential campaign.