At the age of 95 left today from life one of the most emblematic figures of modern France, Robert Bandeder. He was a member of the governments of the socialist president of France François Mitterrand and as Minister of Justice he was the one who proposed in 1981 the abolition of the death penalty in France. A particularly difficult task since the French public opinion of the time was in favor of the death penalty and France was one of the last European countries to abolish it. Subsequently, he devoted himself “until his last breath” to the abolition of the death penalty worldwide. As Minister of Justice, he also promoted the decriminalization of homosexuality in his country. He was also a university professor, for 30 years a lawyer, a senator as well as the president of the French Constitutional Council (Constitutional Court).

In Greece, he became particularly well-known in 1992, as the president of a commission of legal scholars of the then EEC, which gave an opinion that the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia met the conditions to be recognized as a state. The son of an urban Jewish family in Paris, he witnessed his father’s arrest by the German occupation authorities. Both his father and several members of his family were taken to concentration camps where they died. During the early years of his legal career he met and defended the McCarthyist-hunted Jules Dassin. At that time he specialized in copyright and then he was a lawyer for actors such as Charlie Chaplin, Brigitte Bardot, Roberto Rossellini and others. He also defended, during the early stages of his political career, François Mitterrand, who had been sued for defamation by Charles de Gaulle’s nephew seeking to deprive him of his political rights. His last official appearance was in 2021 at a ceremony held at the Panthéon, in the presence of President Emmanuel Macron, for the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in France.

He was born in 1928 in a family of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia (today’s Moldova). After studying Philology and Law, he became a lawyer, while also pursuing a university career.

Divorced from the French actress Anne Vernon, he was married from 1966 to the philosopher Elisabeth Bandeder.

After leaving the government, he became president of the Constitutional Court (1986-95). As a senator from 1995 to 1911 he had the satisfaction of seeing the abolition of the death penalty written into the Constitution in 2007.

Active, he was involved in a UN reform project during the 2000s and worked on the reform of the labor code in France under the presidency of François Hollande.

THE French President Emmanuel Macron he greeted via X (formerly Twitter) “a personality of the century, a republican conscience, the spirit of France”.

“He devoted every second of his life to the fight for everything just, to the fight for fundamental freedoms. The abolition of the death penalty will forever be his legacy for France,” he wrote prime minister of France Gabriel Atal.