\n Former French justice minister Robert Badinter, who has died aged 95, saved many lives by dedicating his own to the fight against capital punishment, playing a pivotal role in banning the dreaded guillotine in 1981.\n<\/p>\n
\n The soft-spoken attorney, who said he could not abide by a \"killer justice system\", was widely vilified for pushing through legislation banning the death penalty at a time when most French people still supported the practice.\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n But in years to come he would be hailed for his integrity and statesmanship.\n<\/p>\n
\n The son of a Jewish fur trader who was deported to a Nazi death camp during World War II, he had built a reputation as a lawyer for defending -- often successfully -- notorious cases that his peers wouldn't dare touch.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We entered the court by the front door, and once the verdict had been read and the accused's head was safe, we often had to leave by a hidden stairway,\" the man dubbed \"the murderers' lawyer\" by proponents of the death penalty, recalled.\n<\/p>\n
\n - 'Cut in two' -\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n 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\".\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n Badinter turned the case into a trial of the death penalty, calling in experts to describe in grisly detail the workings of the guillotine.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Guillotining is nothing less than taking a living man and cutting him in two,\" he argued.\n<\/p>\n
\n In all he saved six men from execution during his career, eliciting death threats in the process.\n<\/p>\n
\n He was born in Paris on March 30, 1928 to a Jewish fur merchant who had immigrated from Bessarabia, now Moldova.\n<\/p>\n
\n When he was just 14 his father was among a group of Jews rounded up by the Gestapo in the southeastern city of Lyon and and deported to the Sobibor concentration camp in modern-day Poland, where he died.\n<\/p>\n
\n The young Badinter developed a keen sense of justice that led him to a law degree in France followed by a Masters from New York's Columbia University, with a focus on ethical issues.\n<\/p>\n
\n - 'Until last breath' -\n<\/p>\n
\n Upon his appointment as justice minister in President Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government in June 1981, Badinter made ending the death penalty an immediate priority.\n<\/p>\n
\n France's last execution had been in 1977 with the death of Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of torturing and murdering a young woman.\n<\/p>\n
\n Just four months after taking office Badinter ushered an abolition through parliament with a landmark speech denouncing the \"stealthy executions at dawn\" that were France's \"collective shame\".\n<\/p>\n
\n Demolishing myths about the supposed deterrent effect of the death penalty, he argued: \"If fear of death stopped men in their tracks we would have no great soldiers or sporting figures.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Badinter continued to make history in 1983 when he succeeded in getting Bolivia to extradite Klaus Barbie, a former chief of the Nazis' secret police, the Gestapo, to France.\n<\/p>\n
\n Notorious during the German occupation of France as the \"butcher of Lyon,\" Barbie was put on trial for crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment in a landmark case that saw Holocaust victims take the stand for the first time in France.\n<\/p>\n
\n During his five years as minister Badinter also scrapped a law discriminating against gays on the age of sexual consent and worked to improve conditions in French prisons.\n<\/p>\n
\n A towering figure in French public life, he served as president of the Constitutional Council and as a member of the French Senate from 1995 to 2011.\n<\/p>\n
\n The death penalty remained the bane of his existence until the end.\n<\/p>\n
\n Badinter vowed he would work \"until the last breath of life\" to attain a global ban on the practice and continued to campaign against executions in China and the United States into his later years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former French justice minister Robert Badinter, who has died aged 95, saved many lives by dedicating his own to the fight against capital punishment, playing a pivotal role in banning the dreaded guillotine in 1981. The soft-spoken attorney, who said he could not abide by a \"killer justice system\", was widely vilified for pushing through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-128319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n