Portrait
Lawyer in countless resounding cases, resolutely committed to the left and president of’honneur of the League of the rights of the’homme, Henri Leclerc died on August 31 at 90 years.
By Nathalie Birchem - LaCroix
September 2, 2024
Credits @FFHR.CZ
After Robert Badinter, who died last February, this’ is another legend of the bar that is’ went extinct in 2024. Saturday, August 31, the’avocat Henri Leclerc died at the’hospital of the suites of’un AVC, announced his daughter. « I believe that’today’hui we see disappear the largest lawyer who was still alive », posted on France Info Patrick Baudouin, president of the League of Human Rights’, of which Henri Leclerc was president of’heur.
Born in 1934, Henri Leclerc was awakened to the law and the need for everyone to be defended by a gift from his parents who had offered him for his 14th birthday the book of the resistant Albert Naud, a’office clerk to defend the collaborator Pierre Laval. It’ is moreover this right-wing man who will recruit him and allow him to make his ranges as’avocat. It will also be him who will reveal to him what will be his trademark : « Tu l’as made friendly, your type, you L’aimes bien, he told her after a plea. Well, you made us love it’as.You see, that, it’is your thing, keep going. » « L’avocat has the charge of the fraternity, will confirm the main interested in a final interview, granted last May to L’Humanity. To defend well, you have to understand your client, try to reconcile him with others, pull him up. »
« L’avocat des gauchistes »
Resolutely on the left, Henri Leclerc, who attended the Christian Student Youth for a time and then joined the PCF and then the PSU of Michel Rocard before moving away from it in 1972, has always been a militant. He began his career defending militants of the Front de liberation nationale and the Algerian National Movement (MNA) in the middle of the war in’ Algeria, where he was himself sent as a soldier. During the events of May 68, the one that’on will nickname « l’avocat des gauchistes » will be the defender of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar, Jacques Sauvageot, before becoming that of all social causes, from miners in the North to struggling peasants to Breton fishermen. For twenty years, he has also offered legal consultations at a low price in his Ornano firm.
It will also S’illustrate in a multitude of resounding trials. For example, he defended Charlie Bauer and Francois Besse, two lieutenants from Mesrine, and Florence Rey, an anarchist activist who killed police officers. He was also the’lawyer of Richard Roman, a marginal accused of the murder of’a little girl, as well as Veronique Courjault, the mother of a family who froze her newborns. It is found in major media trials, such as that of Dominique de Villepin in the’ Clearstream case or Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the one at Carlton. By six times he has managed to avoid the death penalty to his clients.
Resolutely hostile to the latter, the one who presided over the French branch of the Ligue des droits de l’homme from 1995 to 2000 was also in all the fights for public freedoms, expressing himself both on prison overcrowding and on undocumented migrants, the’ ban of the veil at the’ecole or the extreme right.
Source: la-croix.com
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