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Death of Robert Badinter: the man who abolished the death penalty
Death of Robert Badinter: the man who abolished the death penalty – (franceinfo)
Robert Badinter passed away on the night of Thursday February 8 to Friday February 9. He remains the Minister of Justice who fought the death penalty in France.
In September 1981, a few months after François Mitterrand’s victory in the presidential election, Robert Badinter, Minister of Justice, asked the National Assembly for the abolition of the death penalty in France. The former lawyer reveals a pleading, which has remained in the history of the Fifth Republic. At the time, public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of the death penalty. The subject regularly comes up in debates, including during the latest death sentences, such as that of Christian Ranucci.
The ban on the death penalty in the Constitution
On September 18, 1981, with the vote of deputies, France, the last democratic country in Europe to practice capital punishment, put an end to it. Almost forty years later, Robert Badinter still expressed his pride in having obtained the abolition of the death penalty and was calm about the future. “The death penalty belongs to the past, and so much the better”, he said. Since 2007, the ban on capital punishment has been enshrined in the French Constitution.
