Francis Szpiner

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 since 2020. He was an attorney for several prominent French politicians. He was born as the youngest of three siblings and the only son into a family with a Jewish-Polish background. His grandparents fled from the Nazis and his parents were printers. After he attended high school at the Lycée Jacques-Decour, he studied law and then joined, in the early 1970s, the Institute of Criminology in Paris of the Panthéon-Assas University. He became a lawyer and a member of the Paris Bar Association in 1975. 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. 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. In June 1987, Bokassa was sentenced to death for murder, but acquitted from charges on cannibalism. In 2003, during Abdullah Öcalans appeal at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, he was a lawyer representing the Turkish Government. The ECHR ruled that Öcalan did not have a fair trial and ordered Turkey to pay a remuneration. 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 job…