For Raphäel Kempf, “we have made the terrorist enemy into a figure against whom anything is permitted.” Worse, it’s undermining the basic of law itself, “whether those actions [in response] are entirely outside the law, or whether this means changing the law to make the judicial attack against this enemy formally legal.”

It’s a dynamic that Kempf has witnessed firsthand. He has emerged as one of his country’s leading criminal defense attorneys amid the French legal system’s own “war on terror.” In 2021 and 2022, Kempf defended Yassine Atar, brother of Oussama Atar, the mastermind of the November 2015 Paris attacks. More recently, he was counsel to one of the defendants in the trial of the “December 8” group — the first anti-terrorism case in France since the 1990s to target individuals of the so-called “ultra left” and make it to court, ending in a guilty verdict for “terrorist conspiracy” in late 2023.

On May 7, Kempf spoke about this situation in a lecture at the Collège de France. In his intervention, here lightly edited for clarity, Kempf analyzed how the search for collective vengeance in the response to terrorism has distorted criminal law and basic ideas of justice.