Raymond de Geouffre de La Pradelle

Raymond de Geouffre de La Pradelle de Leyrat (November 22, 1910 – July 19, 2002) was a French lawyer. His name comes from a village located in the commune of Rignac in Aveyron. Born to Albert Geouffre de La Pradelle and Thérèse Paul-Toinet, he married Hélène Boudet de Castelli (b. 1915) on October 11, 1934. Together, Hélène and Raymond had three children: Géraud, Arnaud, and Marie-Ange. After getting divorced from Castelli, he married Éliane Puech on June 12, 1972. He studied at the Lycée Buffon and at the École Tannenberg in Paris. He became a graduate of the Free School of Political Science in diplomacy, and became secretary of the Italo-Ethiopian Commission of 1928. Later, in 1935, a member of the Conference of Lawyers In 1938, he became the organization's secretary general, and in 1951, vice-president. From 1956 to 1960, de Geouffre was a member of the French division of the International Law Association. He acted as the general secretary of the International Juridical Air Committee from 1952 to 1955, and later a member of the France-Egypt Association in 1965. Before the Second World War, he defended members of La Cagoule; then, after the war, his uncle Pierre, municipal councilor, lawyer and magistrate, who had been prosecuted for his role as an investigating judge in the Vichy government. In 1949, while defending German soldiers prosecuted in French courts, he asked Henri Donnedieu de Vabres for clarification on the legal basis of the Nuremberg trials. He then sat, within the Allied High Commission, on the steering committee of the Association for the Safeguarding of French Assets and Interests Abroad (ASBIFE), alongside representatives of firms such as Saint-Gobain, Schlumberger, Société Alsatian company in mechanical construction, the rubber, petroleum, chemical, mechanical and electrical construction, textile and food sectors, including five champagne houses. On September 27, 1956, he published a guest column on the question of whether or not Egypt had violated international law during the Suez Crisis.