Robert Badinter’s father Simon was deported and killed in Sobibor, as he was one of the victims of the Rue Sainte-Catherine Roundup in 1943.

Badinter started his career in Paris in 1951, as a lawyer in a join work with Henry Torres. In 1965, along with Jean-Denis Bredin, Badinter founded the law firm Badinter, Bredin et partenaires, (now Bredin Prat) where he practiced law until 1981. Badinter’s struggle against the death penalty began after Roger Bontems’s execution, on 28 November 1972. Along with Claude Buffet, Bontems had taken a prison guard and a nurse hostage during the 1971 revolt in Clairvaux Prison. While the police were storming the building, Buffet slit the hostages’ throats. Badinter served as defense counsel for Bontems. Although it was established during the trial that Buffet alone was the murderer, the jury sentenced both men to death. Applying the death penalty to a person who had not committed the killing outraged Badinter, and he dedicated himself to the abolition of the death penalty.

In 1965, Badinter was appointed as a professor at University of Sorbonne. He has continued as an Emeritus professor until 1996.

In this context, he agreed to defend Patrick Henry. In January 1976, 8-year-old Philipe Bertrand was kidnapped. Henry was soon picked up as a suspect, but released because of a lack of proof. He gave interviews on television, saying that those who kidnapped and killed children deserved death. A few days later, he was again arrested, and shown Bertrand’s corpse hidden in a blanket under his bed. Badinter and Robert Bocquillon defended Henry, making the case not about Henry’s guilt, but against applying the death penalty. Henry was sentenced to life imprisonment and paroled in 2001.

In 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president, and Badinter was appointed as the Minister of Justice. Among his first actions was a bill to the French Parliament that abolished the death penalty for all crimes, which the Parliament passed after heated debate on 30 September 1981.

From March 1986 to March 1995 he was president of the French Constitutional Council. Since 24 September 1995 he has served as an elected senator in the Parliament, representing the Hauts-de-Seine département.

In 1989, he participated in the French television program Apostrophes, devoted to human rights, together with the 14th Dalaï Lama. Discussing the disappearance of Tibetan culture from Tibet, Badinter used the term “cultural genocide.” He praised the example of Tibetan nonviolent resistance. Badinter met with the Dalai Lama many times, in particular in 1998 when he greeted him as the “Champion of Human Rights,” and again in 2008.

In 1991, Badinter was appointed by the Council of Ministers of the European Community as a member of the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia. He was elected as President of the commission by the four other members, all presidents of constitutional courts in the European Community. The Arbitration Commission has rendered eleven advices on “major legal questions” arisen by the split of the SFRY.

As a head of the Arbitration Commission, he gained high respect among Macedonians and other ethnic groups in the Republic of Macedonia because he recommended “that the use of the name ‘Macedonia’ cannot therefore imply any territorial claim against another State.” He supported full recognition of the republic in 1992. Because of that, he was involved in drafting the so-called Ohrid Agreement in the Republic of Macedonia. This agreement was based on the principle that ethnic-related proposals passed by the national assembly (and later to be applied to actions of city councils and other local government bodies) should be supported by a majority of both Macedonians and Albanian ethnic groups. The latter minority comprises about 25% of the population. This is often called the “Badinter principle”.

In 2009, Badinter expressed dismay at the Pope’s lifting of the excommunication of controversial English Catholic bishop Richard Williamson, who was illegally made a bishop and has denied the Holocaust. The Pope reactivated the excommunication later.