Mr Badinter was a lawyer, former Minister of Justice and a passionate human rights advocate, best known for his ongoing efforts to end the death penalty. He described seeing one of his clients lose his head on the guillotine that was used in executions in France during the 1970s.
As justice minister under then-President François Mitterrand, Mr. Badinter overcame public opposition and won parliamentary support to abolish the death penalty in 1981.
Mr. Badinter was born to a Jewish family in Paris on March 30, 1928. He witnessed firsthand the horrors of Nazism as well as France cooperated with the Germans during World War II, and he lost his father at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland, according to Macron's office. As a lawyer, Mr. Badinter later pursued a notorious Holocaust denier in court.
Mr. Badinter went on to lead the Constitutional Committee in France He served as a senator for 16 years and was seen as a moral compass for many in France for his advocacy of human rights.
In 1991, Mr. Badinter chaired an arbitration panel established by the European Economic Community to provide legal advice to the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia after two of the country's six republics – Slovenia and Croatia – declared independence. The Badinter Commission, as it became known, was composed of the presidents of the constitutional courts of the member states of the European Economic Community, which served as a precursor to the European Union.
The Badinter Commission issued 15 legal opinions between 1991 and 1993, including one providing for the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This paved the way for international recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as sovereign states in 1992.
The Badinter Commission also declared the borders between the republics of the former Yugoslavia as international borders between newly independent states that could only be changed through diplomacy, not force. Despite the legal declarations, wars broke out in the 1990s in Croatia and later in Bosnia and Kosovo, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing the largest number of refugees in Europe since World War II.
Macron will head a national party Greetings to Mr. Badinter, said the President's Office.
Mr. Badinter's marriage to the actress Anne Vernon ended in divorce. He was married to Elizabeth Badinter, a feminist philosopher, and had three children, but a full list of survivors was not immediately available.
