2024-02-09 20:41:00
Robert Badinter and 2021 (EPA-EFE/Ian Langsdon/Pool via REUTERS)
The jurist Robert Badinter, who as Minister of Justice under President François Mitterrand brought to Parliament the law that abolished the death penalty in France in 1981, has died at the age of 95, one of his closest collaborators told the press this Friday.
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Badinter, who was in charge of the justice portfolio from 1981 to 1986, had practiced as a lawyer for many years and it was then, defending people who were sentenced to capital punishment and executed, that he finally forged his conviction that there was to end against a punishment that he considered inhuman but also ineffective.
After leaving the Government, Mitterrand appointed him president of the Constitutional Council in 1986, a position he held for nine years and which he combined, among other things, with the Arbitration Commission for Peace in Yugoslavia, created in August 1991 by the European Commission. to prepare legal opinions on the explosion of that country.
Eugen Weidmann, the last man to be sentenced to a public execution by guillotine (Grosby Group)
At the end of his term in the Constitutional Council, although at first he considered the possibility of returning to his profession as a lawyer, again at the request of Mitterrand, he stood for election to the Senate and won a seat with his socialist group, which he maintained. for nine years.
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Robert Badinter was born in Paris into a Jewish family from Romania. His father was arrested in Lyon by the Gestapo in 1943 during the Second World War, when the future lawyer was only 14 years old, and deported to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was murdered.
Persecuted, the family, with his mother and brother, took refuge during the final part of the war in the Savoy area with false identities. At the end of the war, she continued her education with law studies that she completed in the United States.
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Since 1951 and for thirty years he worked as a criminal lawyer in some highly publicized cases that confronted him on multiple occasions with the death penalty, about which he wrote a book, ‘L’Execution’ (The Execution), published in 1973.
The President of France Emmanuel Macron observes Badinter (REUTERS)
With this background, he brought the bill to Parliament in September 1981 to abolish capital punishment, knowing that public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining it.
Despite everything, he managed to get the parliamentary majority of the then left-wing Government, but also a part of the right, to give him their support in the National Assembly, where there were 369 votes in favor, and only 113 against.
Among the first reactions to the announcement of his death, the president, Emmanuel Macron, paid a first tribute to Badinter with a message in X in which he remembered him as a lawyer, as Minister of Justice and as “the man of the abolition of death penalty”.
The current head of Justice, Éric Dupond-Moretti, who has also been a criminal lawyer for many years, highlighted on that same social network that Badinter had been a “visionary and brave” minister who “embodied our Republic and its values.”
(With information from EFE)
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