France's highest court has upheld former President Nicolas Sarkozy's corruption conviction, ignoring his appeal.
The ruling issued by the Court of Cassation on Wednesday means that Sarkozy – who was in power from 2007 to 2012 – must now wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for a year.
Sarkozy (69 years old) responded by saying that he was not prepared to accept “deep injustice” and would now resort to the European Court of Human Rights to appeal the ruling.
He was originally sentenced to three years in prison in 2021, but two of those years were suspended and the third was transferred to electronic monitoring instead of prison.
Sarkozy was convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, after he left office, by suggesting he could secure him a prestigious job in exchange for information about a separate case.
In a 2021 ruling, Judge Christine Mee said the conservative politician “knew what he was doing was wrong,” adding that his actions and those of his lawyer gave the public “a very poor image of justice.”
The crimes were identified as peddling influence and violating professional confidentiality.
Speaking after the Court of Cassation's ruling on Wednesday, Sarkozy's lawyer, Patrice Spinozzi, said his client would abide by the terms of the conviction.
Sarkozy has now exhausted all legal options available to him in France, and his scheduled appeal to the European Court of Human Rights will not delay the implementation of the ruling.
The 2021 conviction was a legal landmark for post-war France.
The only precedent was the trial of Sarkozy's predecessor Jacques Chirac, who was given a two-year suspended prison sentence in 2011 for arranging fake jobs on the Paris City Council for his allies when he was mayor of Paris. Chirac died in 2019.
