Robert Badinter, the justice minister who ended the death penalty in France in 1981, entered the country’s Pantheon mausoleum of outstanding historical figures on Thursday, just hours after his grave was vandalised.

Badinter, a lawyer who campaigned for an end to capital punishment after one of his clients was beheaded with a guillotine in the 1970s, died last year aged 95.

His legacy also includes a 1982 law to decriminalise homosexuality.

His remains are to stay in a cemetery outside Paris, but officers carried a symbolic casket draped in a French flag into the former church on the capital’s left bank under a cascade of applause.

The coffin contained his lawyer’s robe, a speech he made against capital punishment and several books, his wife told the TF1 television broadcaster.

Presid

See Full Page