France/Cambodia: Jaques Verges – The Devil’s Advocate

0`08

The celebrity lawyer, in a previously unknown role. People don’t want to miss this premiere.

0’18

Jacques Verges has discovered his love of acting late in the day. But he values highly anything that perpetuates his public persona.

0’26
And so the 83 year old lawyer makes use of a Paris theatre stage to present this self-made image to the public.

0`38

It is a one-man show. Verges plays Verges.

0’44
The defence of evil against a moralistic front – and in full limelight - this is his passion.

0`52

His performances are known to the public. Verges during a court recess– even here the centre of the attention.

1`08

The man has an unerring instinct for breaking taboos and loves luxury. His house on Place Pigalle in Paris is filled with exquisite gifts from his clients ....

 The French call him ‘the Devil's advocate’.

1`30

Any defendant, even the worst of criminals, needs a lawyer - that is his credo. For this reason, he has fought on the side of evil.

1`42 OT Jacques Verges, Strafverteidiger

"I fight for the dignity of man. I do not accept that a man, even if he is a criminal, should be treated like an animal. There is in every man a remnant of humanity. Today there is, particularly in the West, an inclination for lynching. Make a person guilty of a bad crime, blacken his name, and forget anything positive about him.
I think a lawyer who refuses to defend an accused person is like a doctor who would refuse to treat an AIDS patient because he is against certain sexual practices. "

2`28

Khieu Samphan is his latest client, maybe his last. The Cambodian was formerly head of state in the notorious terrorist regime of the Khmer Rouge. Khieu Samphan created, together with Pol Pot, a kind of agrarian communism.

2’51
During his four-year reign of terror up to two million people were killed in death camps or died during forced labour in the rice fields.

3`00

In 1976 Pol Pot launched a 4-year plan that would eliminate all class distinctions and lead the country into a prosperous communist future. He thought Cambodia's agricultural productivity would be trebled in this way. It achieved the opposite.

3`24

Khieu Samphan must now answer before an international tribunal in Phnom Penh. Jacques Verges uses every opportunity to provoke the court ....

3`39 OT Verges

"I demand that you hand over to me the court documents. The statutes of the court say that there are three official languages: Khmer, French and English. I am just a Frenchman, and can only speak French, and barely any English. The case files consist of 60 000 pages in Khmer, of which only 1500 have been translated into French. I demand: translate the rest for me. As long as they are not translated, I will betray my clients by defending them without knowing the files of the whole case.

3’16

This is the problem: very often the people who have committed such deeds are not gangsters, they have not killed to steal or rape or pillage. I believe that the people of the Khmer Rouge are similar to the people from the era of religious wars, when Catholics and Protestants killed each other - that was in the name of God, on behalf of a conviction of an ideal, and in the name of this ideal, they have done things I denote a crime. The role of a lawyer is to clarify the situation. He can not accept that facts are mixed - because otherwise we understand nothing. "

5`03

No one defends the despots of the world with greater passion than Jacques Verges. He values each of his clients, he says. Evil fascinates him more than the struggle for the supposedly good. Verges has looked into many abysses of the 20th Century.

5`20

He loves the challenge of hopeless cases. He could not keep the top terrorist Carlos off the maximum sentence. Carlos was responsible for countless attacks on Jewish and French organizations, as well as the OPEC raid in 1975 in Vienna.

5`45

He is said to have killed at least 83 people.

5`50

The trial of Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief of Lyons, was regarded by Verges as one of his masterpieces. Yet within a short time he brought the entire nation against himself. For Verges accused the French of co-operation with the Nazis.

In defending Barbie the lawyer lost the last of his left-wing sympathies, on which he had counted.

Klaus Barbie was responsible for the torture and murder of members of the resistance in Southern France.

 Verges expressed nothing but contempt for the victims - even though he himself had fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupiers.

6`40 OT Verges

"What you accuse Barbie of, has been done in Algeria itself. And I go even further: Barbie has killed fewer people in Lyon than Aussares-General in Algiers. The small difference is that the then Colonel Aussares has subsequently become a general, and came into the Legion of Honour. I told the court that you have to stop it, to be colour blind. Before one condemns others, you must look closer to home."

7`15

Verges also evidently felt admiration for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Verges disappeared in the 70s. It is said that he shared a common ideology with Pol Pot.

Pol Pot tried, with incredible brutality, to impose a utopia - even at the cost of millions of deaths.

7`39 OT Verges

"I also feel horror at the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, but I question the motives of the people. You know, I compare literature and the judiciary. Dostoyevsky felt hatred against the nihilists, but all his fictional characters are nihilists. Because these people pose issues that challenge him. As for me, I said one day, I would defend Hitler, because he challenges me; these people make me suspicious. One who is capable of ordering the executions of millions of people and at the same time stroking his dog, and to love his wife with a kiss on the hand and to welcome his secretaries. The shocking thing about a criminal is that he remains a human being."

8`42

“I, the brilliant villain.” This is how Verges once described himself in an interview. Perhaps an apt description for a provocateur with a penchant for the wrong--doers of this world.

Today he will set off once more for Phnom Penh, to devote himself yet again to the defence of evil.

Bericht: Alexander Steinbach, Hans Woller

Kamera: Alex Gorski

Schnitt: Thomas Rützler