Jeannette Bougrab


Jeannette Bougrab is a French lawyer and politician. She served as the junior minister for Youth and Community Life from to and is a member of the UMP party. Prior to this, she was the Chair of the French Equal Opportunities and Anti-Discrimination Commission from to.

Early life

Jeannette Bougrab was born in Déols, to a Harki father. She received a Masters in Law from the University of Orléans in 1997. In 2002 she completed a PhD in Public Law from the Sorbonne in Paris as well as a Masters in Economics Law.

Career

She has been an associate Professor of Law at Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris and the Sorbonne. She also worked as a lawyer for the Constitutional Council of France.
She served on the Board of Directors of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire until 2007. She has been a member of the Haut Conseil à l'Intégration, the Administrative Board of the Arab World Institute and the diversity oversight of the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel. In 2010, she also became Chair of the Administrative Board of the Agence pour la Cohésion Sociale et l'Egalité.
In 2015, she was appointed at the head of the Institut Français in Finland.

Personal life

She is an atheist and a supporter of French secularism. She has claimed that she was the companion of cartoonist Charb, who was director of the Charlie Hebdo satirical journal and was killed in the Charlie Hebdo shooting in January 2015; however, Charb's family has strongly disputed this.
Bougrab has stated to the media, "I always knew he was going to die like Theo Van Gogh. I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t." She has also said that Charb never had children because he knew he was going to die, that he defended secularism and the spirit of Voltaire. "I admired him before I fell in love with him and I loved him because of the way he was, because he was brave. He thought that life was a small thing unless he was defending his ideals," she said.
Charb's family, via a statement issued by his brother on 10 January 2015, denied the existence of any "interpersonal commitment" between Charb and Jeannette Bougrab. In response Jeanette Bougrab authorized the release of recent photographs of the couple together.