This includes Nazi officer Klaus Barbie "the Butcher of Lyon" in 1987,[1] terrorist Carlos the Jackal in 1994, and former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan in 2008.

As a result of taking on such clients, he garnered criticism from members of the public, including intellectuals Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut, political-activist Gerry Gable as well as Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld.

[3][4] Vergès attracted widespread public attention in the 1950s for his use of trials as a forum for expressing views against French colonial rule in Algeria, questioning the authority of the prosecution and causing chaos in proceedings – a method he promoted as "rupture defense" in his book De la stratégie judiciaire.

In 1942, with his father's encouragement, he sailed to Liverpool to become part of the Free French Forces under Charles de Gaulle, and to participate in the anti-Nazi resistance.

[10] After the end of World War II he entered the University of Paris, where he enrolled in the Faculté des lettres pursuing a degree in history, studying the Hindi and Malagasy languages.

On 25 May 1946, Alexis de Villeneuve, who ran for the legislative elections under the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) against his father, Raymond Vergès, was assassinated in front of the cathedral of Saint-Denis in Réunion.

Vergès became a nationally known figure following his defence of the anti-French Algerian guerrilla Djamila Bouhired on terrorism charges: she was convicted of blowing up a café and killing eleven people inside it.

[16] In an effort to limit Vergès' success at defending Algerian clients, he was sentenced to two months in jail in 1960 and temporarily lost his licence to officially practice law for anti-state activities.

[19] In 1965, Vergès arrived in Israel, seeking to represent Mahmud Hijazi (מחמוד חיג'אזי), a Palestinian member of the Fatah movement who had at the time been sentenced to death by an Israeli military court on charges of terrorism, for crossing into Israel and setting a small demolition charge near the National Water Conduit in the Galilee.

There are claims that Vergès was spotted in Paris by Mohamed Boudia, a contact from Algerian War and an old Communist associate, Jiří Pelikán.

He was also thought to be in several Arab countries in the company of Ali Hassan Salameh and Palestinian militant groups according to the Lebanese attorney Karim Pakradouni, and exiled Algerian politician Bachir Boumaza.

[25] After Vergès's return to public life he resumed his legal practice, taking on a variety of legal cases ranging from; Muslim children who wanted to wear headscarves in school, transfusion-transmitted HIV/AIDS patients contaminated by unscreened blood, prostitutes suing their pimps for back pay to defending high profile war criminals and dictators.

", going on to say there was nothing his client did against the Resistance that was not done by "certain French officers in Algeria" whom Vergès noted could not be prosecuted because of de Gaulle's amnesty of 1962.

[27] As such, Vergès argued that the republic had no right to convict Barbie of anything given that French officers like the war hero General Jacques Massu had also engaged in torture and extrajudicial executions during the fight against the FLN.

[28] Besides his tu quoque defense of arguing that French actions in the Algerian War were no different from Barbie's, Vergès spent much time attempting to prove the Resistance hero Jean Moulin had been betrayed by either the Communists, the Gaullists, or both, which led him to argue Barbie was less culpable than those who had betrayed Moulin.

[35] In April 2008, former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan, and old associate of Vergès, made his first appearance at Cambodia's genocide tribunal.

[36] After the US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003 and deposed Saddam Hussein, many former leaders in the Baathist regime were arrested.

[citation needed] In January 2008, he personally supported Tomislav Nikolić, nationalist leader of the Serbian Radical Party.