French lawyer and politician Robert Badinter, former Minister of Justice who was the president of the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia in 1991, died on Friday at the age of 95, French media reported.

Badinter – lawyer, professor of law at the Sorbonne and president of the French Constitutional Council – at the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, was the head of the so-called Badinter Commission, which in December 1991 issued an opinion that the Social Federalist Republic of Yugoslavia was in the process of disintegration, on the basis of which, on January 15, 1992, the states of the European Economic Community (EEC) recognised the independence of Croatia and Slovenia within the existing borders.

In his long legal and political career, he advocated for the abolition of the death penalty in France, which was achieved in 1981.

A Jewish intellectual and minister in the socialist government, whose father died in a German concentration camp, Badinter was the target of numerous attacks by the French right, some of which were tinged with anti-Semitism.