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In November 1972, Roger Bontems, a 36-year-old peasants’ son from the Vosges region of eastern France, was guillotined for his part in a prison escape during which a fellow inmate cut the throats of a nurse and a guard. Bontems did not commit the murders. Nonetheless, he was executed as an accomplice to the crime.
The case was a turning point in the career of Robert Badinter, Bontems’ defence lawyer, who has died at the age of 95. Haunted by his failure to save his client’s life, Badinter became a crusader for the abolition of the death penalty in France — a mission he accomplished nine years later as justice minister in the Socialist-led government of President François Mitterrand.
The guillotine had been the French state’s preferred method of execution since the Terror of the 1790s, during which thousands were put to death. The last execution by guillotine in France took place in 1977.
The Bontems case prompted Badinter to publish The Execution, a 1973 book in which he described “the sharp snap” of the guillotine blade that severed his client’s head from his body. Speaking to the French legislature after it abolished the death penalty, Badinter declared: “Thanks to you, France’s justice will no longer be a justice that kills.”
Badinter’s 1981-86 spell as justice minister is remembered for other notable reforms such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the improvement of prison conditions and establishment of the right of French citizens to petition the European Court of Human Rights for redress of injustices.
Badinter served from 1986 to 1995 as head of France’s constitutional council, which reviews the compatibility of laws with the Fifth Republic’s constitution. From 1995 to 2011 he was a member of the Senate, the upper legislative chamber. He was a stout defender of judicial independence, as he showed in the Clearstream affair, a scandal that triggered political attacks on the investigating magistrates who are a mainstay of France’s justice system. Badinter told the Financial Times in 2006 that the magistrates were a “guarantee of political independence”.
For his illustrious achievements, President Emmanuel Macron has said Badinter’s remains should be placed in the Panthéon, the Paris mausoleum and resting place of champions of social reforms such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola and Jean Jaurès.
“Robert Badinter never stopped pleading for enlightenment,” Macron wrote on X. “He was a person of the century, a man with a republican conscience and a spirit that was French.”
Born in Paris on March 30 1928 to Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, an eastern European region now in Moldova and Ukraine, Badinter moved with his family to Lyon after the Nazi invasion of France in 1940.
Under the round-ups and deportations of Jews led by the Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”, Badinter’s father, Simon, was sent in 1943 to the Sobibór extermination camp. He never returned. Forty years later, Badinter was instrumental in securing Barbie’s expulsion from Bolivia to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity.
Before he entered politics, Badinter worked as a lawyer in Paris and professor at the Sorbonne’s faculty of law. He played parts in the creation in 2002 of the International Criminal Court and in the drafting of a constitution for the EU — a project that collapsed after rejections in French and Dutch referendums.
On the international stage, his career’s most controversial episode was his chairmanship of the European commission set up in 1991 to provide legal advice on what was turning into the violent break-up of communist Yugoslavia. Critics of the commission’s work contended that it prompted a hasty declaration of independence by Bosnia and Herzegovina, accelerating that republic’s descent into a war that killed about 100,000 people.
At the same time, the Badinter commission displayed little sympathy for the aspirations to independence of the ethnic Albanian majority population of Kosovo, a Serbian-ruled province. Kosovo also fell into war before gaining independence in 2008.
Disliked by French politicians on the far right and extreme left, Badinter was politically engaged to the end of his days. Last year he co-authored a book, Vladimir Putin: The Accusation, in which he made the case that the Russian leader should be held accountable for atrocities in Ukraine.
Badinter is survived by his second wife, Élisabeth, an author, and their children, Judith, Simon Marcel and Benjamin.
