Robert Badinter, father of the abolition of the death penalty in France, dies

The brilliant lawyer and former Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter, died on the night of Thursday to Friday at the age of 95. A figure from the time of President François Mitterrand, he embodied until his last breath the fight for the abolition of the death penalty.

Initially criticized for having defended causes that went against the grain, he gained a reputation as an independent humanist, to the point of being considered a moral authority. “I tried to transform Justice, make it more humane,” he said in November 2023 in an interview on the program 'La Grande Libraire', “was I successful? Would you say?”

In an interview with France 24 in 2022, he stated his conviction that one day the abolition of the death penalty would be imposed throughout the world.

Minister of Justice under the socialist president François Mitterrand, he introduced the law of October 9, 1981 that abolished the death penalty, in a France then majority in favor of the supreme sentence. Later he supported, until his “last breath of life,” the universal abolition of capital punishment.

President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday that a “national tribute” will be paid to him. “It is a milestone for many generations.” “The nation has certainly lost a great man, a great lawyer,” “a wise man,” declared the head of state on the sidelines of a trip to Bordeaux dedicated to Justice and the Police.

With the execution, “the crime changes sides,” stressed Badinter, born in Paris on March 30, 1928 into a Jewish family emigrated from Bessarabia (today Moldova).

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

In 1942, when he was only 14 years old, his father was arrested before his eyes in Lyon. He died during his deportation to the Sobibor concentration camp (Poland), while his family took refuge in Savoy.

“The murderer's lawyer”

After studying literature and law and graduating as a fellow from Columbia University, Robert Badinter became a lawyer at the Paris bar and, at the same time, pursued a career as a university professor.

Co-founder, together with Jean-Denis Bredin, of a prestigious business law firm, he defended personalities, big names in the press or business, and sometimes intervened in court.

After a first marriage and subsequent divorce, this upper-class man was married since 1966 to the philosopher Élisabeth Badinter, whose maiden name was Bleustein-Blanchet, with whom he had three children.

In 1972 he failed to save Roger Bontems from the guillotine, an accomplice in a hostage situation that ended in death. It was then that he went “from intellectual conviction to militant passion” against the death penalty, he testifies in his book 'Abolition'.

Five years later, he freed child murderer Patrick Henry from the death penalty, who was sentenced to life in prison.

Five other men escaped from the scaffold thanks to him. “We entered the court through the main door and, after the verdict, when the defendant had saved his head, we often had to leave through a hidden staircase” to avoid the wrath of the crowd, he said.

Minister of Justice (1981-1986) and a man considered by some to be “the lawyer of murderers” was the target of all attacks when he voted in favor of the abolition of the death penalty. “I have never had the impression of such loneliness,” he said.

Rejection of “righteous hatred”

Robert Badinter also worked to improve living conditions in prisons.

He voted in favor of the abolition of high security districts, exceptional courts, the decriminalization of homosexuality, access for French litigants to the European Court of Human Rights and a law on compensation for accident victims.

In 1983 he obtained from Bolivia the extradition of Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon. Found guilty of crimes against humanity, Klaus Barbie was sentenced in 1987 to life imprisonment.

Badinter, who always rejected “righteous hatred”, supported in 2001 the release due to age of the former police prefect and minister Maurice Papon, 90, convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity.

After leaving the Government, he presided over the Constitutional Council for nine years (1986-95).

A socialist senator from 1995 to 2011, he had the satisfaction of seeing the abolition of the death penalty included in the 2007 Constitution.

Still very active, he worked on a reform of the UN in the 2000s and on the reform of the labor code during the five-year term of François Hollande.

He was the author of numerous works and even an opera libretto. One of his latest books, 'Idiss' (2018), is dedicated to his maternal grandmother, born in the “Yiddish land” of the tsarist empire.

With AFP