“Faced with politicians, judges are partisan”

→ The subject returns to the debate with the scheduled incarceration of Nicolas Sarkozy, on October 21, 2025, at the Santé prison. The former President of the Republic was sentenced to five years in prison in the case of Libyan financing of his 2007 campaign.

In mid-October, the Council of State rejected Marine Le Pen’s appeal against her five-year ineligibility sentence in the case of European parliamentary assistants. Judgments that some consider politically oriented.

→ The impartiality of judges is nevertheless a fundamental principle in French law, protected by the European Convention on Human Rights and the Declaration of 1789. A judge can be dismissed if there is a legitimate doubt about his impartiality.

According to available information, no request for recusal was made by Nicolas Sarkozy’s defense during his last trial. “Elected officials from all sides have been targeted by investigations,” underlines Cécile Vigour, research director in sociology and political science at the CNRS.

→ In the most sensitive cases, judgments are, most of the time, rendered collegially. At the Sarkozy trial, the president of the 32nd criminal chamber of the Paris judicial court, Nathalie Gavarino, was surrounded by two assessors.

However, some criticize him for his mobilization in 2011, alongside a large number of his colleagues; the one who was then head of state had criticized the magistrates for having let the murderer of Laëtitia Perrais leave without follow-up. She was then a member of the Magistrates’ Union, which “forbids any political involvement”. The union came first in the last professional elections, in 2022. A third of magistrates are unionized.

→ Some also denounce excess zeal: indictment of Agnès Buzyn during the Covid-19 crisis (dismissed), means of investigation deemed disproportionate in the Sarkozy affairs, rapid opening of an investigation against François Fillon during the campaign for the 2017 presidential election…

“Since the 1980s, politicians have been judged like ordinary citizens,” objects Cécile Vigour. This development, common to many other European countries, responds to society’s demand for exemplary behavior. Today’s justice simply claims to apply the law, even in the face of the powerful.