the Court of Justice of the Republic is investigating Amélie Oudéa-Castera after a complaint by Noël le Graët – Liberation

Judicial information has been open since June 21 at the CJR, the only court authorized to judge ministers in the exercise of their function, after remarks by the minister on the management of the French Football Federation (FFF),

A new procedure against a member of the government and a new stage in the war between the Minister of Sports and the former boss of French football: the Court of Justice of the Republic (CJR) is investigating Amélie Oudéa-Castera after a complaint in defamation of Noël Le Graët.

Judicial information has been open since June 21 at the CJR, the only jurisdiction empowered to judge ministers in the exercise of their function, after remarks by the minister in February on the long-term management by Mr. Le Graët of the Federation French football (FFF), learned AFP Friday, June 30 from a judicial source.

Noël Le Graët resigned in February with a bang from the FFF, which he had led since 2011, after a damning audit report from the General Inspectorate for Education, Sport and Research (IGESR) on his management, amid accusations of sexual harassment.

The IGESR inspectors considered in this report that Le Graët “no longer has the necessary legitimacy to administer and represent French football”, particularly given his “inappropriate behavior […] towards women”.

A few hours after his departure, his lawyer had announced a complaint, claiming that Ms. Oudéa-Castera had “lied” on this report and pointing to a difference between the summary of the document, published on February 15 and which evoked the sending by M Le Graët of “SMS ambiguous for some and of a clearly sexual nature for others”, and its entirety. The report was never made public.

According to an extract, consulted at the time by AFP, the inspection mission had noted “a small number of writings (SMS in particular) produced by Mr. Le Graët, using ambiguous formulations which could receive different interpretations and a vocabulary not containing any term of a sexual nature”.

The press law procedure makes it almost automatic, after a defamation complaint, the referral to an investigating judge and the indictment of the author of the remarks, the substantive debate taking place at the hearing. .

However, the case law is different before the CJR. In 2014, its requests committee had thus closed a complaint for defamation by the controversial polemicist Dieudonné against Manuel Valls, then Minister of the Interior, considering from the outset that the offense of defamation was not sufficiently characterized.