Gilbert Collard
Gilbert Collard (born February 3, 1948 in Marseille ) is a French lawyer, defense attorney and politician of the right-wing extremist Rassemblement National . He was a member of the National Assembly from 2012 to January 2020 and has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019 .
Life
Collard is the son of Odette Tarrazi and Georges Collard and a descendant of Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard . He grew up in the Château de la Madone near Marseille and studied law in Aix-en-Provence . After completing his studies, he worked as a lawyer in Marseille from 1971. He had joined the Freemasonry movement in the late 1960s and later joined the Grande Loge Nationale Française . Collard had been a member of the Parti socialiste since his youth and in 1981 was a member of the support committee of the presidential candidate François Mitterrand .
Career as a lawyer
In 1985, Collard represented Pierrette Le Pen in the divorce proceedings against Jean-Marie Le Pen , the founder of the far-right Front National . In 1987, in the trial against the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie , he represented the accessory prosecution on behalf of the 44 murdered children of Izieu . At the end of the 1980s, Collard became the national secretary of the Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l'amitié entre les peuples (MRAP; movement against racism and for friendship among peoples). However, after he had taken on the defense of the new-right academic and publicist Bernard Notin in 1990 , whom the Disciplinary Committee of the University of Lyon III accused of Holocaust denial , the MRAP announced its suspension, which Collard himself anticipated by resigning. In 1992 he also left the Parti socialiste.
In 1998, Collard represented the cyclist Richard Virusque , who was involved in the Festina affair and was banned for doping. In 2002, he defended the Algerian War General Paul Aussaresses , who was fined for glorifying war crimes for his book. In the case of the aid organization L'Arche de Zoé , Collard represented the two main defendants, Éric Breteau and Émilie Lelouch, in 2007, who tried to bring 103 children - allegedly orphans from Darfur - from Chad to France on a charter plane. However, they changed defense attorney before the trial ended.
The following year, Collard defended the French photojournalist Jean-Paul Ney , who was in custody in Ivory Coast on charges of "endangering state security". In February 2011 he took over the representation of Fabien Engelmann , a former trade unionist of the communist CGT, who had been relieved of his union functions because of his membership in the right-wing extremist Front National . In April 2011, the daughter of the disempowered Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo commissioned Collard, together with Roland Dumas and Jacques Vergès , to defend her father, who was accused of complicity in crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Court in The Hague .
Political activity
In 2002 he applied for the office of mayor of Vichy , calling himself a candidate for the center-right Démocratie Libérale , then the Parti radical valoisien , although both of them supported incumbent mayor Claude Malhuret . With 23 percent of the vote, he came in third place. At the same time he was elected to the Vichy municipal council, but renounced his seat. In an interview in 2005 he described himself as radical (left-wing liberals) and supporter of Jacques Chirac , the Gaullist president, and rejected political extremism. He ran again in Vichy in 2008, this time for the Nouveau Center , but failed again in third place.
Collard had known Marine Le Pen since her parents' divorce process. In May 2011 he declared himself a Mariniste (naval supporter) and became chairman of their committee of support for the upcoming presidential election . However, he did not initially become a party member of the Front National (FN), but represented the so-called de-diabolization of the right-wing extremist party. As a candidate for the Rassemblement Bleu Marine , an alliance made up of the FN, smaller right-wing parties and non-party supporters, he stood in the 2012 parliamentary elections in the 2nd constituency of the Gard department . With 42.8% he was able to prevail in the second round against the socialist Katy Guyot (41.6%) and the previous Conservative MP Étienne Mourrut (15.6%). He was next to Marion Maréchal-Le Pen one of two FN candidates who succeeded in entering parliament.
In the 2017 parliamentary elections , he was re-elected with 32.2 percent in the first and 50.2 percent in the second ballot. Shortly after this election, Collard officially joined the Front National, which renamed itself the Rassemblement National (RN) the following year . In the 2019 European elections, Collard was elected to the European Parliament. There he sits in the Identity and Democracy Group , is a member of the Committee on Culture and Education and a delegate in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean . He stepped down from his seat in the French National Assembly in January 2020.
Individual evidence
- ^ Paul Gauthier (ed.): Chronique du procès Barbie pour servir la mémoire. Cerf, Paris 1988.
- ^ En rupture with the MRAP Me Collard assurera la défense d'un universitaire "révisionniste". In: Le Monde , June 15, 1990.
- ↑ a b c Frédéric-Joël Guilledoux, Laurent d'Ancona: Le Vrai Gilbert Collard. Mission «casse-couilles démocratique». Fayard, 2013.
- ^ Jean-Michel Amitrano: A Vichy, Gilbert Collard se fait l'avocat des démagos. In: Liberation , March 3, 2001.
- ^ M. Gilbert Collard: Assemblée Nationale , assemblee-nationale.fr
- ↑ Biography de Gilbert COLLARD , monsieur-biographie.com
Web links
- Entry on Gilbert Collard in the Members' database of the European Parliament
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Collard, Gilbert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French politician (Front National), member of the National Assembly |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 3, 1948 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Marseille , France |