Robert Badinter

ROBERT BADINTER, WHO ABOLISHED DEATH PENALTY IN FRANCE, DIES AT 95

February 11, 2024:

Former French justice minister Robert Badinter, who abolished capital punishment in France in 1981, has died at the age of 95, one of his aides told local media on February 9, 2024.
Badinter, who served as justice minister from 1981 to 1986, died overnight, the aide said.
“Lawyer, Minister of Justice, and the man who abolished the death penalty, Robert Badinter never stopped pleading for the Enlightenment. He was a person of the century,” French president Emmanuel Macron wrote on the social media platform X.
Shortly after assuming office under President Francois Mitterrand, Badinter introduced legislation to the parliament banning the death penalty, which he deemed “inhumane and ineffective.”
Following his tenure in government, Badinter was appointed as the head of France’s Constitutional Council in 1986, a position he held for nine years.
Upon concluding his term at the Constitutional Council, he successfully ran for Senate and retained his seat for nine years.
Badinter was born in Paris to a Jewish family from Romania in 1928.
His father was arrested by the Gestapo in Lyon in 1943 during World War II, when Badinter was just 14 years old, and subsequently deported to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was killed.
During the latter part of the war, Badinter, his mother, and brother sought refuge in the Savoy region of France under false identities due to security reasons.
After the war, he pursued his education in law, ultimately completing his studies in the United States.
From 1950 to 1980, he worked as a criminal defense lawyer, handling several high-profile cases that often brought him in conflict with the death penalty, a subject on which he authored a book ‘L’Execution’, published in 1973.
In September 1981, upon assuming the role of Justice Minister, he presented a bill before the parliament to abolish the death penalty, despite knowing that public opinion was overwhelmingly against the legislation.
However, he managed to secure support from the left-wing majority government at the time, as well as some from the right, to successfully abolish capital punishment in France.
He said later he had "never felt so lonely" in fighting capital punishment, which in France was carried out by beheading with the guillotine, a practice dating back to the French Revolution of 1789.
His career took a decisive turn in 1972 after one of his clients, Roger Bontems, was beheaded for his secondary role in the murder of a nurse and a guard during a prison escape.
Badinter was haunted by his failure to win a stay on Bontem's execution in a case that changed his stance on the death penalty "from an intellectual conviction to a militant passion".
Five years later he helped convince a jury not to execute Patrick Henry for the murder of a seven-year-old boy, becoming an instant hate figure for many French people, who were baying for Henry's head.
Badinter turned the case into a trial of the death penalty, calling in experts to describe in grisly detail the workings of the guillotine.
"Guillotining is nothing less than taking a living man and cutting him in two," he argued.