Jacques Vergès, 1925–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Jacques Vergès never met a killer he wouldn’t represent. For more than 50 years, the French lawyer defended a rogues gallery of terrorists, dictators, and fanatics, including Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and terrorist mastermind Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—aka Carlos the Jackal. “I would have defended Hitler,” he once said. “Defending doesn’t mean excusing. A lawyer doesn’t judge, doesn’t condemn, doesn’t acquit. He tries to understand.”

Vergès’s “childhood experiences defined him,” said The Guardian (U.K.). He was born in Thailand to a Vietnamese mother and a French father, who was fired from the diplomatic corps over his interracial marriage. His family’s experience gave Vergès what he called “the subject that obsesses me—humiliation. I hate to see someone humiliated.” In 1957, after qualifying as a lawyer in Paris, Vergès found fame defending Algerian terrorists who planted bombs in cafés and bars. “Instead of contesting the evidence of French prosecutors in court,” said The New York Times, “he insisted that the defendants were resistance fighters in a just war of liberation.” In the late 1960s, Vergès started defending Palestinians accused of hijackings and other crimes. “I’m a bit like Don Juan,” he said. “I love revolutions like he loved women. I like to go from one to the other, and I like them when they are young.”

In early 1970, Vergès “vanished and was not seen publicly for eight years,” said The Washington Post. Observers speculated that he was with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, training as a KGB spy, or touring Palestinian training camps. He suddenly reappeared in Paris, and never explained what he called “my holidays.” He was soon back in the spotlight defending Barbie, known as “the Butcher of Lyon” for his role in the torture and death of thousands of French citizens during World War II. During the 1987 trial, Vergès virtually ignored the charges against his client. Instead he attacked Israel, France, and other Western countries for committing “crimes against humanity” that were “more serious” than those ascribed to Barbie—who was convicted like most of Vergès’s clients, and sentenced to life in prison.