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 jobs in the town 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.