Robert Badinter, the Minister of Justice who abolished the death penalty in France, dies. The jurist went from being the most unpopular minister in the country, when he ended with the guillotine, to becoming a great moral reference in France.
He was born in Paris into a Jewish family from Romania and his father was arrested by the Gestapo during World War II, and deported to the Sobibor extermination camp, where he was murdered. Badinter was the target of hatred from the French right, a hatred partly tinged with anti-Semitism.