France’s highest court on Wednesday upheld former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s corruption conviction, ordering him to wear an electronic tag for a year. The ruling by the Cour de Cassation means that Sarkozy- who was in power from 2007 to 2012- must now wear an electronic monitoring bracelet for the next one year.

Sarkozy had initially appealed against the conviction, for which he had been handed a three-year prison sentence. Two of the years were suspended, and the former presidents is to wear the electronic monitoring bracelet rather than going to prison for the remainder of the year.

Sarkozy, 69, reacted by saying he was not prepared to accept ‘the profound injustice’ and would now head to the European Court of Human Rights to challenge the verdict. “The challenge that I will be bringing to the European Court of Human Rights may, alas, lead to a condemnation against France,” Sarkozy wrote on the social media platform X. “I want to once again state that I am clearly innocent,” he added.

This latest move at the Strasbourg-based ECHR will, however, not hold up today’s verdict from being carried out. The sanction now comes into force, Sarkozy having exhausted all the legal avenues in the case in France.

His lawyer Patrice Spinosi said it was a “sad day” when “a former president is required to take action before European judges to have condemned a state over whose destiny he once presided.”

Earlier in 2021, a lower court found that Sarkozy and his former lawyer, Thierry Herzog, had formed  a “corruption pact” with judge Gilbert Azibert to obtain and share information about a legal investigation.

The corruption case that led to Wednesday’s ruling concentrated on phone conversations that took place on February 2014. At the time, investigative judges had launched an inquiry into the financing of Sarkozy’s 2007 presidential campaign.

During the inquiry, it was later discovered that Sarkozy and his lawyer Thierry Herzog were communicating via secret mobile phones registered to the alias “Paul Bismuth.” The crimes were specified as influence-peddling and violation of professional secrecy.

The 2021 ruling was a legal landmark for post-war France. The only precedent was the trial of Sarkozy’s predecessor Jacques Chirac, who got a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for having arranged bogus jobs at Paris city hall for allies when he was Paris mayor. Chirac died in 2019.