# 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 between 2020 and 2023. He was elected Senator of Paris in September 2023. He was an attorney for several prominent French politicians.

## Education and early life

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 [fr] in 1975.

## Professional career

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 2001, he represented Michel Tabachnik in his trial regarding the mass suicides organized by Order of the Solar Temple where Tabachnik was acquitted. In 2003, during Abdullah Öcalan's 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 jobs in the city hall of Paris. Juppé was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence and given 10 year political ban in January 2004. Then he was the attorney for the relatives of the murdered Jewish Moroccan Ilhan Halimi. Halimi was sequestrated and killed by members of the Gang of Barbarians. The prosecution alleged Halimi was murdered for being a Jew and Szpiner obtained a life sentence for the gang leader in 2006, but demanded higher sentences for his accomplices. He also represented the entrepreneur Hubert Haddad who had been accused of bribing the President of French Polynesia Gaston Flosse.
Haddad and Flosse were both sentenced to five year imprisonment in October 2012. He represented the victims of Carlos the Jackal. For Carlos he obtained a life imprisonment. In 2013 he co-founded the Law Firm Stas & Associates In 2015 he represented Qatar who sued Florian Phillipot for repeatedly accusing Qatar of financing terrorism. He represented the Government of Senegal in a trial against the mayor of Dakar Khalifa Sall. The mayor of Dakar was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for corruption charges in 2018 but pardoned by the Senegalese president Macky Sall in September 2019.
The authorities of the city of Paris's announced on 8 May 2024, that a high street, ergo a boulevard in France will be named after the 2024 murdered Vladimir Putin's opponent, Alexei Navalny, and designated as L 'avenue Alexei Navalny for the 16th arrondissement, very close to the Russian embassy in Paris, with a monument memorial for the generations to come, after the initiative by Francis Szpiner's idea.

## Political career

In 1990, he was appointed chief of staff to Alexandre Léontieff, then president of the government of French Polynesia; in 2002, he ran against Arnaud Montebourg in the sixth district of Saône-et-Loire. In the municipal elections of 2020, he was elected as the mayor of the 16th arrondissement of Paris representing The Republicans.

## Books

* Fantôme de papier
* Mat d'echecs
* Une affaire de femmes was adapted for screen by Claude Chabrol as A story of women.
* Une affaire si facile

## Recognition

* April 2021 Lawyer of the month by Le Figaro.
* 2011 Legion of Honour
* 2000 Received the rank of an Officer of the French Order of Merit