Overview

• President Emmanuel Macron is set to deliver a tribute, with the Élysée presenting Badinter as a singular embodiment of the rule of law.
• As justice minister in 1981, he steered Parliament to abolish the death penalty after a more than two-hour address to the National Assembly on September 17.
• His reforms reached beyond capital punishment, including the 1981 decriminalization of homosexuality.
• His advocacy fed into international norms against execution, later reflected in France's 2002 accession to the UN Second Optional Protocol and Europe's Protocol 13.
• New reflections accompany the commemoration, including Flammarion's "Vivre," a collection of 2006–2023 interviews on his life, the Shoah, and his humanist convictions.