Gisèle Halimi

Biography

Gisèle Halimi (born Zeiza Gisèle Élise Taïeb, Arabic: زايزا جيزيل إليز طيب; 27 July 1927 – 28 July 2020) was a Tunisian-French lawyer, politician, essayist and feminist activist.

As a lawyer, she defended activists fighting for the Algerian nationalism, then a French colony, from the 1950s onwards, including members of the National Liberation Front (Algeria) (FLN). From 1960 onwards, she defended the activist and militant Djamila Boupacha, who was accused of attempted murder and then survived torture and rape while being detained by French soldiers. Alongside Simone de Beauvoir, she publicized the trial in order to highlight the French army's methods of torture during the Algerian War.

A leading figure in French feminism, she was the only lawyer to sign the 1971 Manifesto of the 343, which brought together women who declared that they had had abortions and demanded free access to abortion, which was then illegal in France. In the wake of this, she founded the Choisir la cause des femmes (Choose Women's Cause) movement, alongside Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Rostand, among others. In 1972, during the Bobigny trial, her work as a lawyer for women accused of illegal abortion led to the acquittal of three of the defendants and a suspended sentence for the fourth, and contributed to the evolution towards the Veil Act, named for Simone Veil, on voluntary termination of pregnancy in 1975.

Similarly, her high-profile strategy for two young women who were victims of a gang rape in 1974, tried in 1978, Anne Tonglet and Araceli Castellano, contributed to the adoption of a new law in 1980, clearly defining indecent assault and rape, allowing the latter to be recognized as a crime, whereas until then it had most often been treated as a misdemeanor under French law.

In 1981, Halimi was elected to the French National Assembly, as an independent Socialist and served as Deputy for Isère until 1984. Between 1985 and 1987, she was a French legate to UNESCO. In 1998, she was a founding member of ATTAC.