Collector 4 stamps - Robert Badinter (1928-2024) - Green Letter

What a life Robert Badinter lived! Lawyer, activist, intellectual, minister, he has spanned the century with an unshakeable determination to defend justice and the law. Born into a Jewish family from Bessarabia, he moved to Paris in 1928. For the world's persecuted, France was a dreamland where all men were equal. But then came the war. His father's deportation in 1943 scarred him for life. He will always be the son of the man hunted down, stripped of his rights and murdered. After becoming a star lawyer in 1951, he led a carefree life before facing the death penalty in 1972 when he defended a man who had not killed but was guillotined all the same. From that moment on, he was committed to the cause and became a leader of the abolitionists. From 1972 to 1980, he saved the heads of five men already sentenced to death. In 1981, appointed Minister of Justice by François Mitterrand, he carried out the guillotine execution. Inventor of community service, he decriminalized homosexuality, reformed the judiciary to make it more independent, and promoted compensation for victims. President of the French Constitutional Council from 1986 to 1995, and a senator until 2011, this wholehearted, upright and sincere man, fiercely attached to republican universalism, is considered a high moral conscience at his death in 2024. "The death penalty does not defend society, it dishonors it. Extract from the Panthéon speech delivered by Robert Badinter on October 9, 2021, to mark the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty.

Photos : (c)Manuel Litran/Parismatch/Scoop ; (c)Jean-Régis Roustan/Roger-Viollet ; (c)Laurent Maous/Gamma Rapho ; (c)Arthur Weidmann/Fastimage Texte : Jean-Yves Le Naour - Conception graphique la nouvelle