Jacques Vergès

Arriving in Paris, Jacques Vergès joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1945. On 25 May 1946, Alexis de Villeneuve, who ran for the legislative elections under the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) against his father, Raymond Vergès, was assassinated in front of the cathedral of Saint-Denis in Réunion. The firearm used belonged to Raymond Vergès.[14]

After returning to France, Vergès became a lawyer and quickly gained fame for his willingness to take controversial cases. During the struggle in Algiers he defended many accused of terrorism by the French government. He was a supporter of the Algerian armed independence struggle against France, comparing it to French armed resistance to the Nazi German occupation in the 1940s. Vergès became a nationally known figure following his defence of the anti-French Algerian guerrilla Djamila Bouhired on terrorism charges: she was convicted of blowing up a café and killing eleven people inside it.[12] This is where he pioneered the rupture strategy, in which he accused the prosecution of the same offenses as the defendants.[15] She was sentenced to death but pardoned and freed following public pressure brought on by Vergès' efforts. After some years she married Vergès, who had by then converted to Islam.[16] In an effort to limit Vergès' success at defending Algerian clients, he was sentenced to two months in jail in 1960 and temporarily lost his licence to officially practice law for anti-state activities.[17] After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, Vergès obtained Algerian citizenship, going by the name of Mansour.[18] During the Algerian War he had become acquainted with Ahmed Ben Bella of the FLN and the first President of Algeria, Swiss Nazi and financier for the FLN, François Genoud, as well as Ahmed Huber, a Swiss Muslim-convert and Nazi who covered the war as a journalist.[19]

In 1965, Vergès arrived in Israel, seeking to represent Mahmud Hijazi (מחמוד חיג'אזי), a Palestinian member of the Fatah movement who had at the time been sentenced to death by an Israeli military court on charges of terrorism, for crossing into Israel and setting a small demolition charge near the National Water Conduit in the Galilee.[20] Israel's Justice Minister Dov Yosef forbade Hijazi's being represented by a foreign lawyer. Vergès was detained at the airport and deported.[21] Nevertheless, though Vergès did not succeed in getting to represent Hijazi in court, his initiative generated considerable publicity and controversy which were influential in Hijazi's death sentence being eventually commuted by an appeals court. (Hijazi was later released in a 1971 prisoner exchange.)

Jacques Vergès at théâtre de la Madeleine, in Paris, 2008.

From 24 February 1970 to 1978, Vergès disappeared from public view without explanation. He refused to comment about those years, remarking in an interview with Der Spiegel that "It's highly amusing that no one, in our modern police state, can figure out where I was for almost ten years."[22] Vergès was last seen at an anti-colonial rally in Paris. He left his wife, Djamila, and cut off all his ties with his friends and family. Many people wondered if he had been killed, kidnapped, become a spy, or had gone into hiding.[23] His whereabouts during these years have remained a mystery. Many of his close associates of the time assume that he was in Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge, a rumour Pol Pot (Brother #1), Nuon Chea (Brother #2) and Ieng Sary (Brother #3)[24] have denied. There are claims that Vergès was spotted in Paris by Mohamed Boudia, a contact from Algerian War and an old Communist associate, Jiří Pelikán. He is also alleged to have been in Switzerland at the house of François Genoud according to Ahmed Huber. He was also thought to be in several Arab countries in the company of Ali Hassan Salameh and Palestinian militant groups according to the Lebanese attorney Karim Pakradouni, and exiled Algerian politician Bachir Boumaza.[25]

• Front de Libération National (Algeria)
• Baader-Meinhof gang

• Anis al-Naqqash
• Bernard Bonnet
• Bruno Bréguet
• Charles Sobhraj
• Félix Houphouët-Boigny
• Georges Ibrahim Abdallah
• Gnassingbé Eyadéma
• Idriss Déby
• Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal
• Klaus Croissant
• Magdalena Kopp
• Omar Bongo
• Omar Raddad
• The ex-captain Paul Barril the Élysée wiretapping affair
• Roger Garaudy
• Siné
• Slobodan Milosevic (legal council)
• Tariq Aziz

The thrust of Vergès's defence in the case was that Barbie was being singled out for prosecution while the French state conveniently ignored other cases that qualified as crimes against humanity.[1] Vergès adopted a tu quoque defense, asking the judges "is a crime against humanity to be defined as only one of Nazis against the Jews or if it applies to more serious crimes...the crimes of imperialists against people struggling for their independence?", going on to say there was nothing his client did against the Resistance that was not done by "certain French officers in Algeria" whom Vergès noted could not be prosecuted because of de Gaulle's amnesty of 1962.[27] As such, Vergès argued that the republic had no right to convict Barbie of anything given that French officers like the war hero General Jacques Massu had also engaged in torture and extrajudicial executions during the fight against the FLN.[27] Vergès argued in impassioned speeches before the court that the main conflict motivating history was the struggle between the "Global North" vs. the "Global South", and that American policy in the Vietnam war and French policy during the Algerian war were the "true face" of the West.[28] Vergès maintained to convict Barbie was a base act of hypocrisy for a French court as his actions were those of a typical Westerner, and therefore he could not be punished for doing merely other Westerners had done.[28]

Caricature of Vergès and Klaus Barbie during the trial, by Calvi

Besides his tu quoque defense of arguing that French actions in the Algerian War were no different from Barbie's, Vergès spent much time attempting to prove the Resistance hero Jean Moulin had been betrayed by either the Communists, the Gaullists, or both, which led him to argue Barbie was less culpable than those who had betrayed Moulin.[29] Vergès claimed Moulin's colleagues were "playing a double game" and all those in the Resistance "whether they were anti-Gaullists or anti-Communists forgot their duty to the Resistance because of partisan political passions".[30] At one point, Vergès claimed that Moulin had actually wanted to be tortured to death and tipped off Barbie himself.[31] Under French law, defense lawyers are entitled to use competing theories in defense of their clients, unlike the prosecution who must stick to only one line of argument. Barbie was not on trial for the torture and murder of Moulin as the statute of limitations in the Moulin case had expired, but instead on trial for crimes against humanity for his role in deporting Jews from Lyons in 1942-44, for which there was no statute of limitations.[31] Barbie was on trial for his role in the arrest and deportation of 44 Jewish children from the Izieu orphanage on 6 April 1944.[32] Of the 44 children, 42 were killed at Auschwitz.[32]

Vergès seems to have brought in the Moulin case as part of his defense of Barbie as a strategy of historical obfuscation and confusion, as he argued that the truth about who betrayed Moulin to Barbie can never truly be answered.[31] The implication of Vergès's argument was that other aspects of Barbie's life were likewise uncertain and unknowable, making the question of whatever Barbie committed crimes against humanity impossible to answer. Despite Vergès's best efforts at obfuscation and a tu quoque defense of comparing Barbie's actions to French actions in Algeria and American actions in Vietnam, the court found Barbie guilty of crimes against humanity, sentencing him to life imprisonment.[31] Reviewing the film Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, the film critic David Denby wrote the climax of the film was when the French filmmaker Marcel Ophüls pressed the "despicable" Vergès during an interview about his defense of Barbie, whom Denby wrote "...persists in pretending that Barbie is a victim of some sort".[33] Vergès was paid to defend Barbie by Swiss Nazi financier François Genoud, who Vergès had met during the Algerian War due to their mutual support for the FLN.

In 1999 Vergès sued Amnesty International on behalf of the government of Togo.[34] In 2001, on behalf of Idriss Déby, president of Chad, Omar Bongo, president of Gabon, and Denis Sassou-Nguesso, President of the Republic of the Congo, he sued François-Xavier Verschave for his book Noir silence denouncing the crimes of the Françafrique on the charges of "offense toward a foreign state leader", using an arcane 1881 law.[35] The attorney general observed how this crime recalled the lese majesty crime; the court thus deemed it contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, thus leading to Verschave's acquittal.[35]

Vergès on the first day of opening statements for the Samphan trial in 2011

In April 2008, former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, and old associate of Vergès, made his first appearance at Cambodia's genocide tribunal. Vergès represented Samphan, using the defence that, while Samphan has never denied that many people in Cambodia were killed, as head of state he was not directly responsible.[36]

After the US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and deposed Saddam Hussein, many former leaders in the Baathist regime were arrested. In late 2003, Vergès offered to defend Hussein after he was approached by Sadam's nephew who was putting a legal team together.[3] However, the Hussein family opted not to use Vergès.[37]

In May 2008, Tariq Aziz assembled a team that included Vergès as well as a French-Lebanese and four Italian lawyers.[38]

Note: Few works by Vergès have been translated into English.

• Mervyn Jones, Ordeal : The Trial of Djamila Bouhired, Condemned to Death, Algiers, July 15th, 1957, London, Union of Democratic Control Publications, c. 1958, 1979. "With the complete text of the speech for the defence, by Jacques Vergès."

• Pour Djamila Bouhired, with Georges Arnaud, Éditions de Minuit, 1957.
• Le droit et la colère, with Michel Zavrian & Maurice Courrégé, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, coll. « Documents », 1960.
• Le crime de colonialisme. Colloque de Rome, 2, 3, 4, février 1962, in Revue Les Temps modernes (N°190), Gallimard, Paris, March 1962.
• De la stratégie judiciaire, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, coll. « Documents », 1968.
• Pour les fidayine. La résistance palestinienne, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, coll. « Documents », Paris, 1969.
• Agenda, Paris, Simoen, 1979
• Pour en finir avec Ponce Pilate, Le Pré aux clercs, 1983
• La Face cachée du procès Barbie. Compte-rendu des débats de Ligoure (with Étienne Bloch), S. Tastet, coll. «  Formule rompue », 1983
• Beauté du crime, Plon, Paris 1988
• Je défends Barbie (preface by Jean-Edern Hallier), Jean Picollec, Paris, coll. « Documents dossiers », 1988
• Le Salaud lumineux, Michel Lafon, 1 January 1990
• La Justice est un jeu, Éditions Albin Michel, 1992
• Lettre ouverte à des amis algériens devenus tortionnaires, Éditions Albin Michel, coll. « Lettre ouverte », 1993
• Mon Dieu pardonnez-leur, Michel Lafon, 1995
• Intelligence avec l'ennemi, Michel Lafon, 1996
• J'ai plus de souvenirs que si j'avais mille ans, Éditions 84, 1999
• Nocturne. Poésie, Éditions Olbia, 2001 (ISBN 978-2719105368)
• Avocat du diable, avocat de Dieu (entretiens avec Alain de La Morandais), Paris : Presses de la Renaissance, 2000 (ISBN 978-2-85616787-8)
• Un procès de la barbarie à Brazzaville (co-author Dior Diagne), Jean Picollec, 2000
• Noir silence, blancs mensonges, Jean Picollec, Paris, 2001
• Les Sanguinaires : sept affaires célèbres, J'ai lu, 2001
• Omar m'a tuer - histoire d'un crime, J'ai lu, 2001
• L'Apartheid judiciaire, with Pierre Marie Gallois, L'Âge d'homme, Lausanne 2002
• Le Suicide de la France, Olbia, 2002
• Dictionnaire amoureux de la justice, Plon, coll. « Dictionnaire amoureux », 2002
• Les Erreurs judiciaires, Presses universitaires de France - PUF, coll. « Que sais-je ? », 2002
• Justice pour le peuple serbe, L'Âge d'Homme, coll. « Collection Objections », 2003
• La Démocratie à visage obscène : le vrai catéchisme de George W. Bush, La Table ronde, 2004
• Les Crimes d'État et comédie judiciaire, Plon, 2004
• Passent les jours et passent les semaines : Journal de l'année 2003-2004, Plon, 2005
• Jacques Vergès, l'anticolonialiste (conversations with Philippe Karim Felissi), Paris : le Félin, coll. « Histoire et sociétés », 2005 (ISBN 2-86645-584-3)
• Malheur aux pauvres, Plon, 2006 (ISBN 978-2259199223)
• Crimes contre l'humanité massacres en Côte d’Ivoire, Pharos, 276 p., avril 2006
• Que mes guerres étaient belles !, Éditions du Rocher, 2007 (ISBN 978-2268060989)
• Journal : La passion de défendre, Éditions du Rocher, 2008 (ISBN 978-2268065069)
• Justice et littérature, Presses universitaires de France, coll. « Questions judiciaires », 2011 (ISBN 978-2130575382)
• « Crimes et fraudes » en Côte d'Ivoire, Édite, 2011 (ISBN 978-2-84608-306-5)
• Sarkozy sous BHL (with Roland Dumas), Éditions Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2011, 128 p.
• De mon propre aveu, Éditions Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, 2013 (ISBN 978-2-36371-053-6)

• Jonathan Widell, Jacques Vergès, devil's advocate: a psychohistory of Vergès' judicial strategy, Doctor of Civil Law thesis, McGill University, 2012

• Emmanuelle Bosc, Jacques Vergès: la plaidoirie de l'indéfendable par la dénonciation de l'inavouable, sn, 1992
• Robert Charvin, Jacques Vergès : un aristocrate de refus, Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 2013
• François Dessy, Jacques Vergès, l’ultime plaidoyer : conversations entre confrères avec maître François Dessy, Editions de l'Aube, 2014
• Véronique Martin, Jacques Vergès envers et contre tous, Paris: Editions de Verneuil, 1999
• Bernard Violet and Robert Jégaden, Vergès: le maître de l'ombre, Paris: Seuil, 2000