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French politician and lawyer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Francis Szpiner (born 22 March 1954) is a French lawyer, writer and politician of The Republicans who serves as the mayor of the 16th arrondissement of Paris between 2020 and 2023.[1] He was elected Senator of Paris in September 2023.[2] He was an attorney for several prominent French politicians.
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Francis Szpiner | |
|---|---|
Szpiner in 2020 | |
| Member of the French Senate for Paris | |
| Assumed office 2 October 2023 | |
| Mayor of the 16th arrondissement of Paris | |
| In office 11 July 2020 – 7 November 2023 | |
| Preceded by | Danièle Giazzi |
| Succeeded by | Jérémy Redler |
| Councillor of Paris | |
| Assumed office 28 June 2020 | |
| Mayor | Anne Hidalgo |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 22 March 1954 Paris, France |
| Political party | The Republicans |
| Education | Lycée Jacques-Decour |
| Alma mater | Panthéon-Assas University |
| Profession | Lawyer |
He was born as the youngest of three siblings and the only son into a family with a Jewish-Polish background.[3] His grandparents fled from the Nazis and his parents were printers.[3] After he attended high school at the Lycée Jacques-Decour,[4] he studied law and then joined, in the early 1970s, the Institute of Criminology in Paris of the Panthéon-Assas University.[4] He became a lawyer and a member of the Paris Bar Association in 1975.[5]
Throughout his career as a lawyer he represented several prominent clients before court and was a legal counselor to Jacques Chirac, Madame Claude or Bernard Tapie.[6] Szpiner represented Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the former Emperor of the Central African Republic during his trial for treason and murder in the Central African capital Bangui.[7] In June 1987, Bokassa was sentenced to death for murder, but acquitted from charges on cannibalism.[8] In 2001, he represented Michel Tabachnik in his trial regarding the mass suicides organized by Order of the Solar Temple where Tabachnik was acquitted.[9] In 2003, during Abdullah Öcalan's appeal at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, he was a lawyer representing the Turkish Government.[10]
The ECHR ruled that Öcalan did not have a fair trial and ordered Turkey to pay a remuneration.[10] He represented the former French Prime Minister and then Mayor of Bordeaux Alain Juppé in a trial, in which Juppé was accused of providing fictitious jobs in the city hall of Paris.[11] Juppé was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence and given 10 year political ban in January 2004.[12] Then he was the attorney for the relatives of the murdered Jewish Moroccan Ilhan Halimi. Halimi was sequestrated and killed by members of the Gang of Barbarians.[13] The prosecution alleged Halimi was murdered for being a Jew and Szpiner obtained a life sentence for the gang leader in 2006, but demanded higher sentences for his accomplices.[13] He also represented the entrepreneur Hubert Haddad who had been accused of bribing the President of French Polynesia Gaston Flosse.[14]
Haddad and Flosse were both sentenced to five year imprisonment in October 2012.[15] He represented the victims of Carlos the Jackal.[16] For Carlos he obtained a life imprisonment.[4] In 2013 he co-founded the Law Firm Stas & Associates[17] In 2015 he represented Qatar who sued Florian Phillipot for repeatedly accusing Qatar of financing terrorism.[18] He represented the Government of Senegal in a trial against the mayor of Dakar Khalifa Sall.[19] The mayor of Dakar was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for corruption charges in 2018 but pardoned by the Senegalese president Macky Sall in September 2019.[20]
The authorities of the city of Paris's announced on 8 May 2024, that a high street, ergo a boulevard in France will be named after the 2024 murdered Vladimir Putin's opponent, Alexei Navalny, and designated as L 'avenue Alexei Navalny for the 16th arrondissement, very close to the Russian embassy in Paris, with a monument memorial for the generations to come, after the initiative by Francis Szpiner's idea.[21]
In 1990, he was appointed chief of staff to Alexandre Léontieff, then president of the government of French Polynesia;[4] in 2002, he ran against Arnaud Montebourg in the sixth district of Saône-et-Loire.[22] In the municipal elections of 2020, he was elected as the mayor of the 16th arrondissement of Paris representing The Republicans.[23]
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