A national tribute will be paid in France for Robert Badinter. The former Minister of Justice, father of the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981, died on the night of Thursday February 8 to Friday February 9 at the age of 95. The former lawyer has also worked a lot for Europe.
It is September 1991. The truce in Yugoslavia is fragile. Robert Badinter, then president of the Constitutional Council, was responsible for imagining a constitutional future for the Yugoslav Republics. Here he is interrogated in The Hague: “What is certain is that what has been will no longer be and that the ways of force are excluded.”
His action for the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia went beyond the borders of Europe, as Jean-Dominique Giuliani, who chairs the Robert-Schuman Foundation, a European think tank, recalls: “We owes him, in part, the creation of the International Criminal Court through the effort of conviction and education that he continued to advocate throughout Europe.
“Considered as a European”
Robert Badinter was also asked by several countries of the former USSR to help them write their Constitution: “He was considered a European, a jurist of the highest level and convinced that human rights should be imposed even on States.”, further indicates Jean-Dominique Giuliani.
In recent years, Robert Badinter, author of a book on Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the accusation, has been one of the whistleblowers in France on the consequences of the war in Ukraine for the European Union. This is what Jean-Dominique Giuliani particularly remembers: “He was among the personalities who were lucid about what the war in Ukraine and Russian aggression represents. For a long time he has seen Russia sinking under the pressure of the former KGB. I believe that his opinion also counted in the implementation of the action of the International Criminal Court. He was particularly severe, he was not the only one in France, but that was not in harmony with French diplomacy at the highest level, who thought that we could still speak with Vladimir Putin, which is now considered impossible.”
This article is originally published on rfi.fr
