2023-07-07 23:29:21
Will the interminable affair soon see a breakthrough? The Court of Cassation will deliver its decision on July 28 on the appeals lodged by the Keeper of the Seals Éric Dupond-Moretti against his referral to trial before the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) on suspicion of illegal taking of interest.
In this case, the Keeper of the Seals is suspected of having taken advantage of his function as minister to settle accounts with three former magistrates of the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) and a former Monegasque examining magistrate to whom he had opposed in his first life as a lawyer.
The commission of instruction of the CJR, the only jurisdiction capable of trying ministers for acts committed in the exercise of their functions, ordered at the beginning of October 2022 the dismissal of the ex-tenor of the assizes before its formation of judgment.
Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for Éric Dupond-Moretti before the Court of Cassation, defended seven appeals against decisions or irregularities which would have appeared during the procedure before the CJR, and an eighth against the judgment of October which pronounced his committal to trial.
He denounced the “procedural errors” of the CJR during its investigation and requested the quashing of several decisions of the CJR’s investigating committee so that the minister be treated as “a litigant like the others”.
If his argument was followed, the file would come back into the hands of this commission, which would have to decide again on the charges against Éric Dupond-Moretti.
The plenary assembly of the Court of Cassation, its most solemn formation, debated for more than two hours this Friday morning the eight appeals of Éric Dupond-Moretti, in his absence.
“Jurisprudential Science Fiction”
In this case, worried Patrice Spinosi, “even the obvious are fought, we must fight step by step to obtain the simple application of the common rule”.
If Frédéric Desportes, Advocate General at the Court of Cassation, recognized certain irregularities, he proposed to the Court of Cassation to validate the procedure globally by “emptying the litigation in the interest of a good administration of justice”.
If its opinion were followed, the Court of Cassation would take care of regularizing the procedure by deleting the litigious elements, without delaying the hearing of judgment.
For the Council of the Keeper of the Seals, this solution is “jurisprudential science fiction”. “The end”, obtaining a quick trial against the Keeper of the Seals, “justifies the means”, quipped Patrice Spinosi.
Throughout the investigation, the Keeper of the Seals repeated that he had only “followed the recommendations of his administration” and denounced an instruction against the CJR.
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