PARIS (Reuters) – Former Minister of Justice Robert Badinter died on the night of Thursday to Friday at the age of 95 after a long career as a lawyer and public figure which led him to obtain 1981 the abolition of the death penalty in France.
Born in Paris in 1928 into a Jewish family from Eastern Europe, Robert Badinter registered with the Paris bar in 1951 and taught law for many years.
A tireless supporter of the abolition of the death penalty, against which he pleaded on numerous occasions in French criminal courts, in 1981 he became the Minister of Justice for François Mitterrand, who had just been elected President of the Republic. .
A member like him of the Socialist Party, he carried out in a hostile climate the project to abolish capital punishment promised by the Socialist candidate and which came into force in October 1981.
“Robert Badinter never stopped pleading for the Enlightenment. He was a figure of the century, a republican conscience, the French spirit”, commented on X President Emmanuel Macron while Prime Minister Gabriel Attal deplored that “the country of Lumières loses one of those who continued to make them shine.”
Like him, a lawyer who became Minister of Justice, the current Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, praised a “huge lawyer” and a “visionary and courageous Minister of Justice”.
“Deeply in love with justice, architect of abolition, man of law and passion, he leaves a void worthy of his legacy: immeasurable.”
Patrick Baudouin, president of the Human Rights League, paid tribute on franceinfo to “a tutelary figure, a major figure in our political life, in our judicial life, in the motto of the Republic: freedom, equality, fraternity.”
The abolition of the death penalty has been enshrined in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic since the constitutional revision of February 23, 2007.
Appointed to the presidency of the Constitutional Council by François Mitterrand, Robert Badinter occupied the chair from 1986 to 1995 before embarking on a career as a senator, elected socialist for Hauts-de-Seine from 1995 to 2011.
“What is invaluable about justice. What is admirable about the Republic. What is irreplaceable about humanism,” commented former socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve on X, referring to the disappearance of one of the last great figures of Mitterrandie.
(Nicolas Delame, edited by Sophie Louet)
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