PARIS (AP) — Robert Badinter, who spearheaded the drive to abolish France’s death penalty, campaigned against antisemitism and Holocaust denial, and led a European body dealing with the legal fallout of Yugoslavia’s breakup, has died. He was 95.

French President Emmanuel Macron hailed Badinter, a revered human rights defender and former justice minister, as a “figure of the century” who “never ceased to advocate for the ideas of the Enlightenment.” The French Justice Ministry on Friday confirmed Badinter’s death, without providing details.

A famed lawyer and thinker, Badinter was best known for his sustained push to end capital punishment. He described seeing one of his own clients lose his head to a guillotine, used up until the 1970s to kill criminals in France.

As justice minister under then-President Francois Mitterrand, Badinter overcame public opposition and won parliamentary support for abolishing the death penalty in 1981.

Born in Paris in 1928 to a Jewish family, Badinter saw Nazi horrors and France’s collaboration up close during World War II, and lost his father in the Sobibor death camp, according to Macron’s office.