By CATHERINE FIELD
The trial of President Jacques Chirac's closest lieutenant on financial sleaze charges has snowballed into a major affair that has engulfed France's judiciary.
Allegations of spying, burglary and threats, combined with a bitter verbal campaign against the trio of judges who sentenced him, have tarred the trial of former Prime Minister Alain Juppe, the head of state's protege.
Juppe, 58, was handed an 18-month suspended sentence for abuse of public funds after he employed seven people for Chirac's party whose salaries were in fact paid by Paris town hall.
The offences run back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Chirac was mayor of Paris. Until 2001, Chirac himself was being investigated in connection with the same affair as well as other abuses of office, but he avoided prosecution after the country's top court ruled that he had immunity while he remained head of state.
Juppe has vowed to stay in politics until his appeal is heard, a move that appears to be influenced by Chirac's fears of a rival for his crown, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
No sooner was the sentence pronounced than Chirac's supporters unleashed a verbal barrage, denigrating the judges as politically biased and bent on destroying a man they portrayed as decent, honest and a national asset.
"It is a cynical, hypocritical and disproportionate sentence. It is not a man who was being tried, but a political leader who they were trying to sideline," said UMP legislator Eric Raoult, who is also deputy speaker of the National Assembly.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin suggested the sentence would not stand, because a "final decision" would be pronounced in Juppe's appeal "in a few months".
Even in a country where the judiciary has always been viewed as politically malleable, this intense campaign has drawn widespread indignation.
"We are facing an extremely serious, unprecedented affair" of undermining the judiciary, said former Socialist justice minister Elisabeth Guigou.
Fuelling the controversy, the judges - Catherine Pierce, Fabienne Schaller and Alain Prache - complained that during the trial, their office and personal phones had been bugged and their computer hard disks ransacked; there had been an attempt to break into a padlocked locker; and someone had tried to break into one of their offices via the false ceiling.
Pierce also said she received a letter, supposedly from an unknown left-wing group calling itself "the marginal ones," threatening her with death if the court failed to bar Juppe from public office.
The judges were so wary of spies that they never met in the usual meeting rooms in the court complex; instead they met in a completely different office used by examining magistrates, or in a cafe opposite the courthouse. The verdict was typed up on personal laptop computers and the document kept on a floppy disk that they kept in their pockets at all times.
Apparently seeking to allay public suspicions that he or his surrogates were behind the harassment, Chirac - as "guarantor of the independence of the judiciary" - has ordered an inquiry. The probe will be carried out by Renaud Denoiz de Saint Marc, who is vice president of the State Council, Appeal Court judge Guy Canivet, and Audit Court judge Francois Logerot, representing the country's three highest administrative, judicial and financial bodies.
They are due to report back by the end of February. Two other inquiries have been launched, one by the justice minister and the other by parliament.
Many French judges see Chirac's inquiry and the parliamentary probe as a blatant attempt by the ruling elite to meddle.
The custom is for the Upper Magistrature Council, a commission of senior judges, to investigate the case to guarantee political neutrality.
"Chirac is hoping that the inquiry will uncover bias or flaws in the Juppe verdict," said one judge.
Such cynicism is deep and wide and freely admitted. For French people often say their judiciary has more in common with the Third World than a great nation.
In the past decade, 900 elected representatives and 34 ministers have been summonsed by judges in corruption cases, yet the number of convictions is tiny - a few dozen - and most sentences have been short jail terms or suspended sentences.
Dozens of cases have moved with glacial speed or been kicked into administrative limbo; examining magistrates have been blocked or sidelined in their work; prosecutors have obligingly narrowed or dropped charges; and procedural flaws have strangely let defendants walk free.
One of the problems lies in the hierarchy of the judicial system itself.
When opening an investigation, the prosecutor defines its parameters and the examining magistrate, who carries out the inquiry, must not go beyond them.
If, during this probe, he uncovers evidence of an offence that goes beyond the scope of his investigation, he cannot take things further without the approval of the prosecutor.
The constitution demands that the examining magistrate be independent - but the prosecutor is appointed by the justice minister, who influences his career accordingly.
Thus, in politically sensitive cases, the prosecutor invariably hands the material to the justice minister, who can refuse a widening of the probe, delay it for ages or get another examining magistrate to conduct it if need be. This makes it hard for public and media to figure out an overall view of the scandal.
A former examining magistrate, Eric Halphen, published a book in 2002, Seven Years of Solitude, that recounted in excruciating detail how his attempts to pursue Chirac for alleged kickbacks in public housing contracts were repeatedly thwarted, and how he had been persistently followed, filmed and bugged. He was eventually pulled off the case and retired in disgust after Chirac claimed immunity.
The country's best-known examining magistrate, Eva Joly, lived for six years under 24-hour police protection while she probed high-profile cases that involved former foreign minister Roland Dumas, the use of the state oil corporation Elf Aquitaine as a slush fund and illegal commissions from the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. Last year, after some successes but exhausted by her workload and vilification in the press, she quit and returned to her native Norway.
Many French people look enviously at the "Anglo-Saxon" judicial model with its relative efficiency, fairness, laws of habeas corpus and contempt of court and separation of the judiciary from the executive.
"We are still bogged down in the traditions of the Ancien Regime," said Dominique Barella, head of a centrist association of magistrates, in a reference to the pre-1789 Revolution.
"All the legislators believe that the laws they approve apply to all citizens - except for the government and lawmakers themselves."
Juppe verdict unleashes storm in France
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