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Eva Joly

Eva Joly (born December 5, 1943) is a Norwegian born French magistrate. Born in Grünerløkka, Oslo, she moved to Paris at 18 to work as au pair. Here, against the will of the parents, she married the son of the family, Pascal Joly (now deceased). She changed her name from Gro Eva Farseth to her more French-sounding present one.

Working as a secretary, she took her legal education at night school. Joly specialised in financial affairs, and in 1990 she joined the High Court of Paris as an investigating judge. Here she quickly made a mark with her tireless crusade against corruption, in particular taking on, among others, former minister Bernard Tapie and the bank Crédit Lyonnais. Her most celebrated case, however, was that of France’s leading oil company – Elf Aquitaine. In the face of death threats, she carried on the case to uncover several cases of fraud.

Joly is now working as special adviser to the Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs in Norway. In 2002, Reader's Digest named her European of the Year. In Norway, a film on her life is currently in planning. Filming is supposed to start in late 2006/early 2007, with the working title Sophisticated Men. The 2006 French film L'Ivresse du pouvoir is loosely based on Eva Joly.

• Notre affaire à tous, 2000
• Korrupsjonsjeger: Fra Grünerløkka til Palais de Justice, 2001
• Est-ce dans ce monde-là que nous voulons vivre?, 2003
• May 9, 2001 op-ed in Le Monde, signed with Renaud van Ruymbeke, Bernard Bertossa and other European magistrates or attorney generals, titled "The black boxes of financial globalization", about the Clearstream scandal (Clearstream has been qualified as a "bank of banks" and accused of being a major platform of global money laundering and tax evasion)

• Page in French