The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been stripped of his Legion of Honour, the country’s highest distinction, after his conviction for corruption was confirmed last year, according to an official decree published on Sunday.
The conservative one-term president has been beset by legal problems since leaving office in 2012. In December France’s highest court upheld his conviction for influence peddling and corruption, ordering him to wear an electronic ankle tag for 12 months.
Sarkozy, who remains an important figure in French politics, had been found guilty by a lower court in 2021 of trying to bribe a judge and peddling influence in exchange for confidential information about an investigation into his 2007 campaign finances.
Sarkozy, whose electronic tag was removed this month, has taken the case to the European court of human rights for appeal. His lawyer, Patrice Spinosi, said he had taken note of the award’s revocation but stressed that the appeal was still pending.
An eventual ECHR ruling against France would “imply reviewing the criminal conviction against [Sarkozy], as well as his exclusion from the order of the Legion of Honour”, Spinosi said on Sunday.
Emmanuel Macron argued against the decision, but the rules of France’s top state award stipulate that any recipient definitively sentenced to a term in prison equal to or greater than a year will be excluded from the order.
The French president, who is known to meet Sarkozy regularly, had argued that his predecessor had been elected to the country’s highest office and it was “very important that former presidents are respected”.
The only previous former president to have had his Legion of Honour revoked was the Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain, the head of France’s wartime Vichy regime, who was convicted in August 1945 of high treason and conspiring with the enemy.
Others to have been stripped of the honour include the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, who was found to have used performance-enhancing drugs, and the film producer Harvey Weinstein, convicted of sexual abuse against women.
Sarkozy’s legal woes are not yet over. He has been convicted of illegal campaign financing in his failed 2012 re-election bid, and is currently on trial on charges of accepting illegal campaign financing from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
The court is expected to deliver its verdict in the latter case in September, and prosecutors have asked for a seven-year prison term. Sarkozy denies the charges.
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