Alas, poor grandeur! High public debt, a shaky government, a declining president of the republic, even an incredible theft of Napoleonic jewels from the Louvre: and now the former president Nicolas Sarkozy who turns himself in and ends up in a Parisian prison cell! But no: prison for someone who was the nation’s first citizen has two faces. One is demeaning, of course; but the other makes a people proud who can say they have a justice free from any subjection to the powerful. Finally, the French could today proclaim that the law is the same for everyone, thus announcing a very rare and prestigious condition, almost the realization of an unattainable goal. The sentence was severe, the provisional execution, i.e. with a sentence still subject to appeal, caused astonishment, even though French criminal procedure allows it.
So, while I phone my French friends, starting out with caution so as not to hurt them, I hear them reply “that’s fine, Sarkozy took a lot of money from the Libyans, these are things that shouldn’t be done”. And immediately after the firm conclusion: the law, in fact, is the same for everyone. Or, if you prefer, all citizens are equal before the law. This is also written in our Constitution, and is repeated in capital letters in every courtroom.
But it is at this point that I feel a pang inside me: we were not the country held up as an example of the independence of the judiciary, and in particular by the French colleagues on whom the executive had pressured in the past? And now we are the ones who see the government fighting the magistrates, sometimes with intolerable insolence, but above all with reforms that want to bend justice, such as the separation of careers. We are the ones who from the conference of magistrates from ninety countries came the appeal to stop that reform.
Lastly, memory has its ruthless mechanisms and, speaking of Libya, it whispers “Almasri, Almasri”.
