Klaus Barbie’s lawyer plans to ask for his client’s release from prison so that he can be treated for terminal cancer.
But the chances seem slim that he will succeed.
The 76-year-old former gestapo chief, known as the “butcher of Lyon,” was convicted in 1987 of crimes against humanity and is serving a life sentence.
He is receiving chemotherapy for blood cancer. Defense attorney Jacques Verges says he has asked Professor Leon Schwartzenberg, who is Jewish and one of France’s best-known doctors, to treat Barbie.
According to Verges, “it is not a question of a pardon but of allowing a 76-year-old man to undergo treatment in normal conditions.”
Schwartzenberg, a world-renowned oncologist, confirmed Monday that he was contacted by Verges. He said he would reply only after getting an official request from the Justice Ministry.
A wartime resistance fighter who lost his parents and most of his family in Nazi concentration camps, Schwartzenberg has the reputation of being a “very humane” person.
The 66-year-old former health minister was fired by Prime Minister Michel Rocard in 1988 for expressing his personal views about the treatment of AIDS, which differed from official government policy.
Deputy Minister of Justice Michel Kiejman, who also is Jewish and lost family members in the Holocaust, said Monday it “seems highly unlikely” that Barbie would be released from prison on medical grounds.
Medical pardons are very rare, Kiejman said. The only concession the penitentiary might make is to allow a terminally ill prisoner to meet with family members, he said.
It also appears virtually certain that President Francois Mitterrand would never pardon Barbie or commute his sentence.
It was Mitterrand who engineered Barbie’s extradition from Bolivia in 1985.
Mitterrand ordered him tried for his role in the deportation of thousands of French Jews to concentration camps, including 52 children from a child hostel in Izieu.
The French president demonstrated last week that he was determined to bring war criminals to justice whenever possible.
It was reportedly on his instructions that the prosecution did not appeal a court decision that the former head of the collaborationist Vichy police, 81-year-old Rene Bousquet, must be tried in criminal court for crimes against humanity.
The prosecution had requested that a long-dormant special tribunal be revived to try Bousquet, a process which might have taken years. The request was rejected by the Court of Appeals, France’s second-highest jurisdiction.
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