Corinne Lepage

Corinne Lepage is a renowned French lawyer and politician committed to the protection of the environment.

She holds a doctorate in law and is a graduate of the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. She was sworn in in 1975.

Over the past 40 years, Corinne Lepage has been committed to the environment in various ways.

A renowned lawyer, she defended the victims of the oil spills

resulting from the Amoco Cadiz shipwreck (1978). The

Huglo-Lepage law firm and the Breton communities won their case and thus created a world first in environmental law, which opened the way to stronger protection for communities that were victims of serious pollution. The Erika

and Grande-Synthe cases are other successes that Huglo-Lepage has won and that have left their mark on environmental law.

After a mandate as a local elected official obtained in 1989, in 1995 she responded positively to the proposal of Alain Juppé and became Minister of the Environment until 1997. During her mandate, she carried out the project of the LAURE law concerning air pollution and the rational use of energy. In 1997, thanks to a firm and sustained position on her part, she obtained the non-restarting of the nuclear reactor Superphénix and a moratorium on GMOs.

She will become an MEP from 2009 to 2014 and will be first vice-president of the Health and Environment Committee of the European Parliament.

After the creation of the Cap 21 party in 2000, she founded and chaired the environmental party Rassemblement citoyen – Cap 21 in 2014, which she still chairs today.

From 1975 to 2011, she pursued in parallel to her professional and political activities a teaching career at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris for 30 years as a lecturer and then professor at the Institute of Political Studies of Paris, but also as a lecturer in several universities.

She is the author of some thirty works on environmental law and political essays of a general nature or more specifically on environmental issues. She has also published several hundred articles in French and European journals.

Finally, she is very involved in community life. In addition to the Friends association of the Universal Declaration of Humankind rights (Association des amis de la Déclaration Universelle des Droits de l’Humanité in french : ADDHu), which she created and has chaired since 2015, she currently chairs WECF, the association justicepesticide, the movement of entrepreneurs of the new economy (MENE).