Anti-colonialist, iconoclast and lawyer, Jacques Vergès was a Frenchman who gained international renown for defending some of the most notorious criminals in modern history. He also had an ego that rarely knew limits. In a 2008 interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel, he said of a seven-year period in the 1970s when he had disappeared without trace: “I enjoyed reading my obituaries. They were about a highly gifted young man who had left this world.”
This week, at the age of 88, Vergès did leave the world. Georges Kiejman, a fellow lawyer, described him as “a fascinating and mysterious man – one of the two or three extraordinary lawyers of my generation”.
Possibly the most polemical character ever to take up his profession, aged 17 Vergès had fought heroically in the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. But he also defended the Nazi Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon. His list of clients reads like a roll-call of evil itself – apart from Barbie there were Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal; Khieu Samphan, Cambodia’s former head of state accused of crimes against humanity; and Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein, to whom he also offered his services.