Robert Badinter, a “just” for posterity | EUROtoday

Pew males embody of their lifetime, with as a lot readability, the universality of human rights, the protection of public freedoms and a sure concept of ​​justice and the Republic, as Robert Badinter, who died on the evening of February 8 to 9, on the age of 95. If the abolition of the loss of life penalty, the battle of his life, gained in 1981, will stay connected to his title within the historical past of France, it’s as a result of, very controversial on the time, it was by no means of itself, even after the election of François Mitterrand.

An important determine and conscience of the progressive camp, the previous lawyer who turned Keeper of the Seals, and probably the most hated minister of the Fifth Republic, then president of the Constitutional Council, additionally embodies the makes an attempt of the left to make concrete, for every citizen, the train of human rights proclaimed within the founding texts of the Republic. ” Francehe repeated, is not the homeland of human rights, it is the homeland of the Declaration of Human Rights. »

This conviction of the need to constantly wage battle to bring reality closer to the universalist ideals proclaimed, but always threatened, Robert Badinter had undoubtedly inherited it from his father who had fled the pogroms of Bessarabia, a man for whom France was confused. with the Republic, that of the emancipation of the Jews through the Revolution and that of human rights. He probably also got his strong ideas from the shock of the persecution of the Jews in Vichy France which led to the assassination by the Nazis of part of his family, including his father.

The need for counter-powers

Long a lawyer for politicians and stars, the hard worker, ascetic grand bourgeois and sure of his talent, will strengthen his abolitionist convictions in the defense of assassins. The horror of “dry click of the blade on the stop” of the guillotine, in 1972, during the execution of Roger Bontems, whose head he did not succeed in saving, will give him the strength to confront the supporters of the death penalty and to vote for its pure and simple suppression by the 1981 law, shaping its “just” stature for posterity.

But his time at the Ministry of Justice must also be welcomed for the adoption of a multitude of texts reinforcing the rights of numerous individuals, from the suppression of the “crime of homosexuality”, in 1982, to the authorization granted to prisoners from watching television, to direct referral by citizens to the European Court of Human Rights.

A reminder of Robert Badinter's convictions on the need for independent counter-powers, his intransigence on the rule of law, his anger on the functioning of prisons “man crushers” appears salutary at a time when the Minister of the Interior opposes politics to the law, when the role of the Constitutional Council is contested, when prison overpopulation reaches worrying records.

The rectitude of the former Minister of Justice, his intransigence and stoicism in the face of targeted attacks from the far right, his stubbornness in defending universalist and European values, his ability to choose fair fights and win them can only be appreciated. inspire the left, which has barely recovered from the test of power. But it is undoubtedly the intense strength of conviction of a “great man” worthy of the Pantheon, the coherence of his struggles with his personal, professional, political and intellectual itinerary, that everyone will keep as a legacy of the great French conscience that was Robert Badinter.