Former Justice Minister Robert Badinter dies at 95 | EUROtoday

Figure of the Mitterrand years, good lawyer and former Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter died within the night time from Thursday to Friday on the age of 95. He embodied till his final breath the battle for the abolition of the demise penalty.

Initially criticized for having defended causes that went in opposition to the grain, he constructed a status as an impartial humanist, to the purpose of being thought-about an ethical authority. “I tried to transform justice, make it more human,” he mentioned in November 2023 in an interview on the present “La Grande Librairie”. Did I succeed? To be judged.”

Minister of Justice beneath socialist president François Mitterrand, he launched the regulation of October 9, 1981 which abolished the demise penalty, in a France then predominantly in favor of this supreme punishment.

He subsequently invested, till his “last breath of life”, for the common abolition of capital punishment.

With the execution, “the crime changes sides”, underlined this son of a furrier, born in Paris on March 30, 1928 in a Jewish household who emigrated from Bessarabia (now Moldova).

This slim and stylish man with thick black eyebrows, defender of a France “in the service of freedoms and human rights”, took his thirst for justice from an adolescence marked by the Second World War.

In 1942, when he was solely 14 years outdated, his father was arrested earlier than his eyes in Lyon. He died throughout deportation within the Sobibor focus camp (Poland), whereas his household took refuge in Savoy.

“From intellectual conviction to militant passion” in opposition to the demise penalty

After learning literature and regulation, and graduating from Columbia University as a scholarship holder, Robert Badinter turned a lawyer on the Paris bar and on the identical time pursued a profession as a college trainer.

Co-founder with Jean-Denis Bredin of a prestigious enterprise regulation agency, he defends personalities, massive names within the press or enterprise, and infrequently pleads in courtroom.

Divorced from an actress married within the Fifties, this upper-class man has been married since 1966 to the thinker Élisabeth Badinter, née Bleustein-Blanchet, with whom he had three kids.

It was when he failed, in 1972, to save lots of Roger Bontems from the guillotine, an confederate in a murderous hostage-taking, that he moved “from intellectual conviction to militant passion” in opposition to the demise penalty, he testified. he says in his e book “Abolition”.

Five years later, he spared the demise penalty for baby assassin Patrick Henry, who was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Five different males escaped the scaffold because of him. “We entered the courthouse through the main door, and after the verdict, when the accused had saved his head, we often had to leave by a hidden staircase” to keep away from the anger of the group, he mentioned. -he.

Having turn into Minister of Justice (1981-1986), the person who was thought-about by some as “the lawyer of murderers” was the goal of all assaults when he voted for the abolition of the demise penalty. “I have never had the impression of such solitude,” he mentioned.

Rejection of “vigilante hatred”

Robert Badinter additionally works to enhance dwelling situations in prisons.

He voted for the abolition of excessive safety districts, that of outstanding courts, the decriminalization of homosexuality, entry for French litigants to the European Court of Human Rights, a regulation on compensation for victims of accidents.

In 1983, he obtained from Bolivia the extradition of Klaus Barbie, the previous head of the Gestapo in Lyon. Found responsible of crimes in opposition to humanity, Klaus Barbie was sentenced in 1987 to life in jail.

Robert Badinter, who has all the time rejected “vigilante hatred”, will assist in 2001 the discharge for causes of age of the previous police prefect and minister Maurice Papon, 90, convicted of complicity in crimes in opposition to humanity.

After leaving the federal government, he chaired the Constitutional Council for 9 years (1986-95).

Socialist senator from 1995 to 2011, he had the satisfaction of seeing the abolition of the demise penalty included within the Constitution in 2007.

Still very energetic, he’s engaged on a reform of the UN within the 2000s and on the reform of the labor code throughout the five-year time period of François Hollande.

This man of tradition is the writer of quite a few works and even an opera libretto. One of his newest books, “Idiss” (2018), is devoted to his maternal grandmother, born in “Yiddishland” of the Tsarist empire.

With AFP