Corinne Lepage

Corinne Dominique Marguerite Lepage (born 11 May 1951) is a French politician.

Lepage says that "I got into environmentalism very early, in the 1960s. As an environmentalist candidate in 1981, and elected in 1989".

She attended Sciences Po in Paris, where she obtained her law diploma; she started practising law in 1975.

In 1978, during the Amoco Cadiz disaster, when an American oil tanker caused a huge oil spill that ravaged the coast of Brittany, Lepage's law firm sided with the local authorities of Finistère and the Côtes-du-Nord against the American oil company Amoco.

After a 15-year-long trial, Lepage's firm and the local authorities were vindicated, a precedent was thus established giving greater protection to individuals, towns and regions victim of serious pollution.

She then worked on many cases concerning the environment, along with local associations, groups, companies or local government.

At the same time, she was appointed Maître de conférences (the equivalent of a university lecturer), and later a Professor at Sciences-Po and Panthéon-Assas University from 1982 to 1986, and then at the Université de Paris at Val-deMarne from 1984 to 1990.

As a young lawyer, Corinne Lepage married Christian Huglo in 1983 and joined the latter's law firm, the first one specialising in environmental rights.

In 1987 she joined the Conseil de l'Ordre des avocats.

Indeed, she became Deputy Mayor of Cabourg in Calvados in March 1989.

From her participation in Ecology Generation in 1990 up to the creation of her own think tank Terre Démocrate in 2009, she shows a desire to "transcend political differencecs" and overcome traditional left/right opposition, in order to "bring people together, beyond their political colors, on the environment".

Close at once to Daniel Cohn-Bendit and François Bayrou, she works for the emergence of "a genuine pragmatic effort, based on fair and sustainable development, democratic and humanist".

She notably wants a rapprochement between centrists and environmentalists.

In the early 1990s, she became a founding member of Ecology Generation.

She ran in the 1993 under this party label for the legislative elections in the fourth district of Calvados.

However, she only received 6.17% of the vote.

She served as French Minister of the Environment in the Alain Juppé cabinets 1 and II 1995–1997 and as Member of the European Parliament (MEP) 2009–2014 for the North-West constituency.

Since her participation in the Alain Juppé government (1995–97), Lepage has sometimes been considered by the media as a right-wing environmentalist, a characterization she does not accept : "They tell me that I am a right-wing environmentalist, no. [...] I am not of the right [...] but I fight for what seems to me to be fundamental for us all in the coming years. [...] The social question was the great debate of the 20th century, I believe the environmental question will be the great debate of the 21st."

Lepage associates herself above all with green and environmentalist politics, attempting to combine ideas of both left and right on environmental issues.

In 1995 she responded affirmatively to a proposal by Alain Juppé to head the Ministry of the Environment in a center-right government.

She was then not a member of any political party.

According to the left-wing newspaper Libération, her nomination was harshly criticised by the right in Normandy as she had just recently been beaten severely in elections there.

Lepage was one of twelve women in the first Juppé government.

She is the founder and President since 1996 of the Citizenship, Action, Participation for the 21st Century Party (CAP 21).

As early as 1996 she said in an interview that "The growing involvement of civil society is essential for the environment and sustainable development".

Since 2006 Lepage has sided with the victims of the MV Erika oil spill of 12 December 1999 against Total among others.

She has taught at the Université de Paris at St.-Quentin-en-Yvelines since 2005.

She is married and the mother of two children.

Between November 2007 and February 2008, she wrote a report for the French Minister of the Environment, Jean-Louis Borloo, a report on "environmental governance".

This report, according to the official of the Grenelle Environnement"makes over 80 propositions, including 10 flagship measures, aimed at restoring the confidence of the French in information on the environment" and "proposes notably measures to improve this information, to reinforce rules regarding expertise and clarify liability in case of pollution".

Lepage also teaches at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University and Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris as a professor of Sustainable Development.

Following the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 she asserted that: "Civil society can now only count on itself to ensure its own future."

She is also co-founder of the centrist Mouvement démocrate and served as Vice-President for the party until March 2010, when she announced that she was leaving the movement.

Lepage was born into a bourgeois Jewish family in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the department of Hauts-de-Seine.

Since 2010 she supports the "Movement for the Rights and the Respect of Future Generations".

She also works as a lawyer for the Association of the Victims of the Floods of La Faute-sur-Mere in wake of Hurricane Xynthia.

Lepage has also defended environmental interests outside of her political career, such as in the Paris and Brussels bar associations and by involvement in numerous NGOs.

She is also the co-founded with Michèle Rivasi of the Observatory for Environmental Vigilance and Alertness.

With Gilles-Éric Séralini, she co-founded CRIIGEN (Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic Engineering), an organization that opposes genetically modified food.

According to her, politics cannot create on its own, without the mobilisation of NGOs and civil society, the solutions and changes necessary to our economic system.