Robert Badinter, the former French Minister of Justice and the man who, in 1981, in one of his first acts as justice minister in the government of President François Mitterrand, wrote the law that abolished capital punishment in France, died early on Friday. He was 95.
At a commemoration ceremony on the 40th anniversary of that historic achievement last September, with French President Macron at his side, Badinter declared, “I want to share with you my absolute conviction that the death penalty must disappear from the entire world as it is a shame for humanity.”
A lawyer and law professor, Badinter championed many civil rights reforms, including addressing victims’ rights and conditions in France’s prisons.
He served as Minister of Justice from 1981-1986, was President of the Constitutional Council of France from 1986-1995, and a member of the Senate from 1995-2011.
He was a member of the Paris Law Faculty and a professor at Columbia University and the University of Paris. He was also a professor emeritus at the Sorbonne Faculty of Law.
Badinter was the author of several books on the death penalty and co-edited, with U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Judges in Contemporary Democracy.
In 2022, Death Penalty Focus recognized Badinter with its International Abolition Award at its Annual Awards Dinner. In his taped acceptance speech, Badinter, not for the first time, called on the United States to abolish capital punishment and join “Western liberal societies everywhere.”
“When I look to the United States, and I was trained at United States universities, what do I notice? That it is the only great democratic state in the world which still keeps this bloody practice. In Western liberal societies everywhere, the death penalty has been abolished without any consequences whatsoever in the rise of crime. It is useless. It is also loaded with social prejudice and, notably, racial prejudice. . . . To me, it’s a useless, bloody, revolting practice, and it doesn’t fit with our democratic ideals.”
