2023-05-09 14:31:00
“Uan immense void that nothing and no one will ever be able to fill”: the death on Tuesday of lawyer Georges Kiejman at the age of 90 sparked a shower of tributes, like the one posted on Twitter by his ex- colleague and Minister of Justice Eric Dupond-Moretti.
The tenor of the bar, a man on the left who had been a minister for François Mitterrand for a time, was an emblematic figure both in the courtrooms and in political and media circles.
Among her peers, Julie Couturier, the president of Paris, honored on Twitter an “outstanding lawyer” who “will remain one of the great figures of the criminal bar”. The President of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, hailed “with emotion her journey and her commitment to justice”, while the journalist Maïtena Biraben remembered her “frizzling eye”.
His detractors mocked the pathological need to seduce this lawyer who defined himself as “The man who wanted to be loved”, in his biographical account written with journalist Vanessa Schneider (Grasset) and published in 2021.
A man of the left and of culture close to Pierre Mendès France and François Mitterrand, Georges Kiejman was for more than half a century a brilliant figure at the bar associated with resounding legal cases.
Born in Paris on August 12, 1932, he is the son of a craftsman who died in deportation (he also called himself a “Jew of the diaspora and from Berry”). A poor young man, he completed his secondary studies in Saint-Amand-Montrond (Cher).
After graduating from higher education in public law, he became a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeal in 1954 and became second secretary of the Internship Conference.
Famous customers
In civilian life, where his causticity makes him formidable, he is a specialist in literary property, publishing, cinema and the press. He was notably the lawyer for Gallimard editions for many years, like that of Gaston Defferre, Simone Signoret, Eugène Ionesco or Roland Barthes.
In criminal cases, he liked to say that his clients were “atypical”. Georges Kiejman thus defended the far-left activist Pierre Goldman, acquitted of the double murder of pharmacists on boulevard Richard-Lenoir after his second trial in 1976.
He had also represented the interests of the United States during the trial of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the alleged leader of the Lebanese Revolutionary Armed Fractions (FARL), sentenced to life imprisonment for the Middle Eastern attacks in Paris in 1986.
He also defended the Italian autonomists, the Cahiers du cinema, the New Wave, Robert de Niro, the prefect Yves Bonnet, the family of Malik Oussekine, the student killed on the sidelines of demonstrations against the Devaquet laws in 1986, the children of General Oufkir detained in Morocco, the Aubrac couple, Charlie Hebdo…
In May 1991, this dandy became Minister Delegate for Communication, after spending six months as Minister Delegate to the Keeper of the Seals. He was Minister Delegate for International Cooperation and Development between 1992 and 1993.
In 2011, this leftist defended Jacques Chirac in the trial of fictitious jobs at the Paris City Hall.
Married for the third time to journalist Laure de Broglie, with whom he has three children, this seducer notably lived with Françoise Giroud, 15 years his senior, and was the husband of actress Marie-France Pisier.
09/05/2023 14:30:04 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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