The Élysée Palace said on Thursday that President Emmanuel Macron will pay a national tribute to lawyer Gisèle Halimi, on the occasion of International Women’s Rights Day on March 8. Died in 2020, Gisèle Halimi had notably defended the right to abortion.
A national tribute to lawyer Gisèle Halimi, who died in 2020, will be paid by Emmanuel Macron on March 8 on the occasion of International Women’s Rights Day, the Elysee said. The head of state will deliver a speech at the Paris courthouse, it was said, confirming information from L’Obs. In 2020, the calendar for a first ceremony had been disrupted by the trip of the Head of State to Lebanon, shortly after the explosion in the port of Beirut. A second date, at the beginning of 2022, had been mentioned, but the tribute had not ultimately taken place.
No entry to the Pantheon
The Elysée rejected the idea of bringing the lawyer, an activist for abortion and against the war in Algeria, into the Pantheon, despite repeated requests from feminist associations and political leaders. Asked by AFP, his son Jean-Yves Halimi, said “we can not be more satisfied” that a national tribute is paid to him. “We owed that to the public figure that my mother was for decades, on many subjects such as the anti-colonial struggle, or the struggle and women’s rights,” he said, saying to himself. also “completely favorable to a pantheonization”.
Gisèle Halimi was one of the main lawyers for the militants of the National Liberation Front (FLN), denouncing the use of torture by the French soldiers, which earned her an arrest and a brief detention. Politician and writer, Gisèle Halimi, she also made her life a fight for women’s rights, marked by a resounding trial in 1972, which paved the way for the legalization of abortion in France.