Opinion

Gisèle Halimi, tireless lawyer and French-Tunisian feminist reference, dies.

photo_camera Fallece Gisèle Halimi, abogada incansable y  referente feminsita franco-tunecina

Today France loses an exceptional Republican, former MP and lawyer. But we also lose a bit all the Maghreb women who seek references in the field of feminism and militancy for women's rights. Franco-Tunisian lawyer Gisèle Halimi died this Tuesday in Paris at the age of 93, but for the rest of us, we are left with a legacy of tireless struggle, an insatiable feminist voice and the perfect definition of “referent”.
Born in Tunisia in 1927, Zeiza Gisèle Elise Taïeb, her maiden name, grew up in a conservative and Jewish family who, as she recounts in her memoirs, hid her birth for weeks because her father did not want to admit that he had had a daughter . Such was her conviction since she was a child that at the age of 10 she decided to go on a hunger strike at home to defend her right to read, as well as her rights not to follow the traditional religious practices of her family.

At 16 she found herself in the horrible situation of a marriage proposal that her parents had arranged for her, and breaking with the family's schemes and principles, she decided to go to Paris where she studied law and settled definitively in 1956 when she married a civil administrator, Paul Halimi, from whom he kept the surname, despite divorcing him and remarrying with Claude Faux, secretary of the philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre, partner of Simone de Beauvoir.
One of the most important causes that Giséle defended was the defense of Djamila Boupacha, who had been accused in 1960 as a member of the National Liberation Front of having planted a bomb. Djamila had been tortured and raped by French soldiers. Giséle Halimi and her friend and another feminist leader, author of "The Second Sex", Simone de Beauvoir brought this cause in favor of Algerian independence to the media. Djamila Boupacha had been sentenced to death and later amnestied, they collected her struggle and her work in a book titled "Djamila Boupacha", and whose cover was illustrated by Pablo Picasso.

Muere Gisele Halimi

Thanks to Giséle Halimi, the young Algerian became an icon of the independence struggle.
This fight for justice made Giséle Halimi the advocate of impossible causes, which were not so impossible and linked her with crucial feminist causes for Maghreb women and also for French women: she was also one of the signatories of the Manifesto of 343, better known as "The Manifesto of the 343 foxes" in which, together with Simone De Beauvoir and other famous women from the middle of the 20th century, they declared in the text that they had aborted outside the law and thus demanded a legal framework that protected and protect women. That 1971 declaration served as a boost to the feminist movement and was one of the bases of the law that in 1975 in France decriminalized abortion. Linked to these causes there are many essays by this brilliant lawyer such as: Viol, Le procès d'Aix: Choisir la cause des femmes (1978), or La nouvelle cause des femmes (1997)

Muere Gisele HalimiGiséle also defended as a relentless feminist the case of a 16-year-old girl, Marie-Claire, who in 1972 was tried for having terminated her pregnancy, the result of rape, with the help of her mother, thus achieving, as her defense attorney, his acquittal. Other times, as an accusation, she was involved in the criminalization of rape in France in 1980, after defending two young Belgians who denounced three men who had raped them in 1974.
In the late eighties, Halimi, a socialist activist and faithful defender of former President François Mitterrand, focused on writing with intimate works in which he spoke of his origins, his family and the political causes that marked his life such as: Viol, Le procès d'Aix: Choisir la cause des femmes (1978), or La nouvelle cause des femmes (1997).

Muere Gisele Halimi

"France loses a passionate republican who, as a lawyer, a militant and a deputy, was a great fighter for the emancipation of women," the president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on Twitter today as a farewell tribute, the Minister of Justice for his part He honored her in the Congress of Deputies, remembering her as a great “militant” and whose obsession was always that of “justice for all and for all”.
Giséle Halimi is a benchmark and a crucial point of reference for all women and men who want to get involved in Law from a feminist perspective.