Gisèle Halimi

Born Zeiza Gisele Elise Taieb into a practising Jewish Berber family in La Goulette, near Tunis, she went on hunger strike as a child against the different treatment given to her brothers and refused an arranged marriage at sixteen. As a lawyer in Paris she defended Tunisian and Algerian independence activists, and from 1960 the FLN militant Djamila Boupacha, whose torture and rape in French custody she and Simone de Beauvoir made public, forcing the army's methods into the open. She was the only lawyer to sign the 1971 Manifesto of the 343, and her defence at the 1972 Bobigny trial of a girl prosecuted for abortion turned the case against the law itself, preparing the Veil Act of 1975. She co-founded Choisir la cause des femmes and later served as a deputy and as France's ambassador to UNESCO.