Éric Dupond-Moretti, a celebrity lawyer turned French minister of justice, has been charged by his own judiciary over allegations that he used his authority to settle personal scores from his past — a scandal that is making waves in the French bar and may potentially weaken two anti-corruption tribunals.

In a break from French political tradition, Dupond-Moretti refused to resign in the face of claims he weaponized the judiciary's disciplinary apparatus against anti-corruption magistrates that investigated him when he was a private citizen in connection with one of the biggest corruption cases in French history. For critics, the affair is emblematic of a segment of the political class that is nonchalant about ethics and plays by a different set of rules.

The French president and his government have defended Dupond-Moretti, who was charged with corruption on July 16 — a departure from the political norms of the last two decades that has divided the French bar. For human rights lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, the affair threatens to envenom relationships between the bar and the bench and exemplifies the increasing lack of accountability of the political class.

"The multiplication of legal proceedings against political figures profoundly undermines confidence in institutions. Though everyone is innocent until proved guilty, the context of a growing mistrust toward the political class and the logic of an unaccountable in-group of elites should not be underestimated," Bourdon and Brengarth said in an emailed statement translated by Law360.

"There's a structural resistance in France," they said, "irrespective of the public affirmations of this or that individual politician, to guaranteeing the exemplarity required of high-ranking public servants."

Since the mid-1990s, an unwritten rule known as the "Balladur jurisprudence," named for former Prime Minister Édouard Balladur, required government ministers who were placed under investigation to resign. Current President Emmanuel Macron has adhered to that tradition in the past. The first minister of justice under his tenure, longtime career politician François Bayrou, resigned in 2017 in advance of being investigated. But politicians have not borne this norm without resentment, according to Bourdon and Brengarth.

Currently, the president, who campaigned on integrity and political renewal, is fully standing behind the current minister of justice, who maintains that he is innocent until proved guilty.

"When you are a member of the government, it's a very common practice to ask for internal review, administrative review on situations that raise questions," government spokesperson Gabriel Attal told French public media on July 19, adding that he believed the investigation would not undermine Dupond-Moretti's judicial reform agenda.

Dupond-Moretti became a household name in France for his high-profile criminal defense work that earned him the nickname "the Acquittator," a play on "Terminator." Lawyers at first hailed the appointment of one of their own, Bourdon and Brengarth said.

"Many lawyers were enthusiastic about and took pride in the nomination of Éric Dupond-Moretti. … Those hopes were more than dashed, especially given the harsh national security laws the justice minister supported without compunction, often flouting the principles he said he supported in his time as a lawyer," they told Law360.

"As for the possibility for the justice minister to work toward the restoration of confidence in the judiciary while he is himself under investigation, only time will tell if the two can be reconciled," Bourdon and Brengarth said. "It is fair to be skeptical."

Dupond-Moretti had made headlines for years for his public spats with the judiciary.

The main dispute at issue in the current probe against Dupond-Moretti relates to the legal morass surrounding embattled ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 2014, the Parquet National Financier, or PNF, an anti-corruption tribunal investigating the financing of Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign, looked into Dupond-Moretti on suspicion that he had tipped off Sarkozy to a wiretap. Dupond-Moretti is a close friend of Sarkozy's lawyer, Thierry Herzog.

Both Herzog and Sarkozy were sentenced in March to a year in prison and two years' probation for bribing a judge to leak them inside information on the campaign finance investigation. The PNF's prosecution of the underlying criminal case, which will determine whether Sarkozy received campaign funding from deposed Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi, is ongoing. 

Dupond-Moretti was cleared of wrongdoing in the wiretap case. But when he learned the court had scrutinized his phone logs, he said the magistrates had proceeded like "government thugs" and he sued the PNF. That suit led Nicole Belloubet, the minister of justice at the time, to open an administrative investigation into the PNF in July 2020. Dupond-Moretti became minister days later and dropped his complaint, given that the defendants were now under his authority.

The Ministry of Justice could not be reached for comment. The minister told Agence France-Presse shortly after he was charged: "I am more than ever determined to fully serve as minister of justice. I derive my legitimacy from the president of the republic and the prime minister." He has since been active in promoting his proposed judicial reforms, including a bill to promote "confidence in judicial institutions."

When the initial administrative inspection into the PNF found no evidence of wrongdoing, Dupond-Moretti, as minister, in September 2020 ordered an additional probe into the three specific magistrates who had looked into him. Three magistrates' unions and Anticor, an anti-corruption nongovernmental organization, filed a complaint in October 2020 with the Cour de Justice de la République, or CJR, a special tribunal that investigates claims of wrongdoing by government ministers. In Anticor's view, Dupond-Moretti's actions could have a chilling effect on the anti-corruption work of the PNF, and in particular its probe of Sarkozy.

"This investigation [ordered by Dupond-Moretti] has the appearance of an administrative review. In reality, it is intended to settle personal scores and send a message to the prosecutors who will carry out the case against Nicolas Sarkozy and Thierry Herzog. The minister is using this inspection against magistrates who investigated him and his best friend," Anticor said in a statement.

"This initiative weakens the PNF, which had demonstrated its efficiency in fighting against the delinquency of the powerful," the group continued. "It suggests the PNF poses a greater problem than the corruption it seeks to combat. This amounts to more than just a conflict of interest."

The Parquet National Financier could not be reached for comment and has issued no statement on the matter.

The CJR is set to face some challenges in the course of this case. For one, the charge Dupond-Moretti faces, "illegal furthering of interests," is vaguely defined, Bourdon and Brengarth said. And not only does the CJR face a political class accusing it of improperly politicizing the judiciary and pitting magistrates against their hierarchy, but the independence of the body that is to deliver the verdict on Dupond-Moretti may be uncertain, according to Anticor's president, Elise Van Beneden.

The CJR is composed of three branches: one evaluates complaints, another interviews complainants and defendants, and a third delivers judgments. The first two are nonpartisan. The latter is composed of six members elected by the National Assembly, six elected by the Senate and three elected by the Court of Cassation, France's highest court of appeals.

The fact that the majority of the judgment branch is chosen by Parliament introduces the possibility of a conflict of interest, according to Van Beneden. She noted that one judge, Naïma Moutchou, a member of Macron's party, has resigned in protest.

"The CJR is being attacked and accused of politicization due to the charges it has pronounced, but in reality, the politicized part of the CJR is the judgment formation, which has not come into play yet," Van Beneden said in an emailed statement translated by Law360. "No mechanism exists [to guarantee that formation's independence]. It was created to protect ministers who find themselves being judged by their politician colleagues."

Dupond-Moretti's trajectory as justice minister was not inevitable and could have been defined by bold reforms rather than scandals, according to a national lawyers' union, the Syndicat des Avocats de France, or SAF.

"The nomination of a lawyer as [justice minister] opened up the possibility that his experience of courtrooms and their litany of difficulties would give him the stature necessary to take on today's challenges: delays in the justice system, substandard conditions for defendants, the complexity of procedures making judges inaccessible, the distressed state of juvenile justice, aggravated prison sentences, the indignity of detention conditions," SAF President Estellia Araez wrote in an open letter on the affair.

"Instead of dividing the judiciary," she said, "we expect the minister to undertake the reforms that we need."

--Editing by Alex Hubbard.

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