Michel Taube, excluded from the World Congress Against the Death Penalty which he himself founded: chronicle of a woke activist drift

While the Republic was celebrating abolition at the Maison de la Radio, the man who invented the NGO Together against the death penaltyThe Global Coalition and the October 10th Day watched the celebration from the sidewalk. Portrait of an oversight.

On Tuesday, June 30th, at the Maison de la Radio et de la Musique (Radio and Music House), Paris was filled with ministers, ambassadors, judges, and human rights activists. The head of state himself was there to open the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty, forty-five years after the Badinter Law and barely a year after its author was interred in the Panthéon. Emmanuel Macron delivered a lengthy, at times somber, speech in which he reminded the audience that capital punishment "has never made a society safer" and that abolition "is never a given, never." The setting was impeccable, and the presidential address lived up to the symbolic weight of the event.

One person was absent, and not the least important: Michel Taube, without whom none of this would exist.

The builder who was relegated to the attic

Michel Taube, editorialist and founder of Opinion Internationale, is also the man who launched the organization of this congress. In 2000, with Olivier Déchaud, Stéphanie Marqui, and Jean-François Daniel, he created Together Against the Death Penalty (Ensemble contre la peine de mort - ECPM). He became its first president. A few months later, he conceived the idea of ​​a global gathering of abolitionists: the first World Congress was held in Strasbourg in June 2001, under the patronage of Nicole Fontaine, then President of the European Parliament, with the support of Robert Badinter. It was also around ECPM that the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty was founded in 2002, and that the World Day Against the Death Penalty was established on October 10, now recognized even by the United Nations.

Twenty-five years later, the house he built is hosting a president of the Republic. And its builder didn't even receive a card.

In an exclusive video filmed for Entrevue magazine, Taube makes no secret of his pride or his bitterness. “I wasn’t invited, even though I founded it,” he says, standing in front of the Statue of Liberty on the Grenelle Bridge, the very spot where, in 2003, he erected 170 mannequins to denounce the executions authorized by George W. Bush in Texas—a bold move that even made headlines on CNN. The man has lost none of his activist spirit. What he has lost is his place in the official narrative of a struggle that is, nevertheless, his own.

When a universal cause becomes a fiefdom

Because behind the sidelining lies a power grab. ECPM is currently chaired by Aminata Niakaté, a Parisian lawyer, deputy mayor of Paris, and, most importantly, national spokesperson for the Greens and NFP candidate in the last legislative elections—this party, now openly woke, whose parliamentarians nearly a third of whom demanded, on Tuesday evening, in the columns of La Tribune The opening of discussions with La France Insoumise and the Communist Party for the 2027 presidential election. This is the direction Michel Taube is directly targeting when he laments that the association's leadership is held by members of "one of the most sectarian parties, the Greens." His criticism is not merely circumstantial: it touches on the very nature of the abolitionist struggle. By anchoring a universal cause to a partisan faction, he argues, one "weakens its influence and its universality." In other words: what was meant to unite people across divides risks becoming a closed ideological stronghold.

On the association's website, the founder's presence has been significantly erased, to the point that he now experiences his marginalization as a form of ostracism—an erasure that Entrevue magazine was able to verify line by line. He himself feels it's a rewriting of history. Therein lies an irony that abolitionist morality should condemn: a movement that makes dignity and memory its core values ​​forgets, or relegates to oblivion, the very person who gave it birth.

A sidelined player who refuses to sabotage the fight

What is most striking is that Taube, far from undermining the fight, reaffirms its necessity with a generosity that contrasts sharply with the treatment he receives. In his video, he welcomes the holding of the congress, rejoices that the next edition will take place in Morocco, a country he believes is destined to become "one of the first in the Arab-Muslim world" to definitively abolish slavery, and applauds Lebanon, on the verge of taking the plunge. He pays tribute to Jacques Chirac, who enshrined abolition in the Constitution, to Nicole Fontaine, and to Badinter. There is nothing in him of the sterile resentment of the sidelined.

He goes even further than the presidential discourse. Where Emmanuel Macron adheres to the principled demand—the death penalty as a denial of human dignity, abolition as the existential horizon of democracies—Taube dares to venture into the territory that official pronouncements avoid: that of alternative sentences. To convince reluctant countries and a French public that, poll after poll, remains largely in favor of reinstatement, he argues unequivocally that "the most dangerous criminals" should be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. "No to the death penalty, but yes to a firm criminal justice system," he summarizes. It is precisely this lucidity, this willingness to be firm in order to disarm fear, that is often lacking in humanist pronouncements, and which was sorely missed this Tuesday in the opulent setting of the Maison de la Radio.

One question remains, one that this 9th Congress inadvertently raises: To whom does a cause belong? To the one who invented it, or to those who, arriving later, took control and adopted its codes? Emmanuel Macron aptly stated that the abolitionist struggle "is never won." Judging by the prominence given to Michel Taube, one might add that his memory is never truly secure either.

The next abolitionist gathering will be held in Rabat. And on October 10, as every year, World Day Against the Death Penalty will be celebrated. Its inventor, however, will continue to commemorate it. "The essential thing is that this cause continues to progress," he says. We would like those who have superseded him to have, for humanity, half the greatness he has shown for the cause.