Juan Branco

Juan Branco (,, born 1989) is a French and Spanish lawyer, political activist and writer.

Branco was born in Spain and grew up in Paris.

While a student at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po), he stood for the Green Party in local elections.

Branco was born in 1989 in Estepona, near Málaga, one of the four children of psychoanalyst Dolores Lopez and Portuguese film producer Paulo Branco.

He grew up in the affluent neighbourhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and attended the École alsacienne, an elite private school.

He studied as an undergraduate at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and as a graduate and PhD student at the École normale supérieure, and also at Paris-IV and Paris-I Universities; obtaining a "maîtrise" in modern literature, a master's in political philosophy, another in geopolitics, and a doctorate in international law.

As a student, Branco stood for the Green Party in the 2008 local elections in Paris.

The following year, he set up the student think-tank Jeune République, with the support of former right-wing Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

He fell out with Filipetti when she did not appoint him as head of her office once she became minister; according to Branco, he was a victim of the Socialist government's new doctrine on the HADOPI law, an online anti-piracy law which he had opposed since 2009.

He then worked on the 2012 presidential election campaign of Socialist Party's candidate, François Hollande.

In 2012, Branco joined François Hollande's Socialist Party presidential election campaign, working in the "culture, audiovisual and media" team as the main collaborator of future Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti.

He went on to do research at Yale University in 2013 and wrote a dissertation on the International Criminal Court and mass violence, travelling to the Central African Republic during the civil war.

After that, he completed his master's degrees followed by his PhD in 2014, and became a legal advisor of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange between 2015 and 2019.

He defended his thesis on 16 November 2014 at the École normale supérieure.

He was then employed in 2015 at the Max Planck Institute in Luxembourg and at La Sapienza University in Rome.

He also worked as a legal advisor to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange between 2015 and 2019.

He unsuccessfully sought asylum in France for Assange.

During this period, he also stood unsuccessfully in the 2017 French legislative election as a candidate for the left wing populist party La France Insoumise.

In the 2017 French legislative election, Branco stood for the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise for Seine-Saint-Denis's 12th constituency, where he came fourth with 13.94% of the vote.

He was an early supporter of Yellow vests movement, appearing at the head of protest marches and being present when protesters forced the doors of Benjamin Griveaux's ministry with a fork-lift truck.

He also defended members of the movement, including Maxime Nicolle, in court pro bono.

Branco was admitted to the bar in April 2017.

Prior to being admitted to the bar, Branco had worked at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the International Criminal Court, an institution on which he wrote two books.

In 2018 he became involved with the Yellow vests movement, some of whose members he defended in court pro bono.

In 2018 he represented his father Paulo Branco in his legal dispute with Terry Gilliam over the film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with the Court of Appeal of Paris ruling in Branco's favour.

In May 2018, Branco was one of the lawyers appointed by the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA) to assist the country's newly-established special criminal court.

After less than two weeks he was dismissed by the United Nations for having posted on Twitter an accusation that Rwandan peacekeepers had massacred thirty civilians in the capital.

Branco has published thirteen books, the most successful of which is Crépuscule (2019).

Selling more than 150,000 copies within a year of publication, the work is a polemic against the links that, according to the author, unite business, media and political leaders in France.

He then called for abstention in the 2019 European Parliament election in France.

In June 2019, together with Israeli lawyer Omer Shatz and Shatz's students from Sciences Po, Branco filed a 245-page submission to the International Criminal Court over the deaths of thousands of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean fleeing Libya; they called for the prosecution of European Union and member states over the EU’s deterrence-based migration policy after 2014.

In 2021, Branco represented one of the cyberbullies in the Mila affair, a teenager who was bullied online after she had insulted Islam.

Branco represented a French fan club of FC Barcelona in an unsuccessful attempt to block Lionel Messi's move to Paris St-Germain from a financial fair play standpoint in 2021.

He then became La Liga's lawyer in 2022 when the league mounted a similar challenge to Kylian Mbappé's new contract with Paris Saint-Germain.

He has courted controversy for his involvement with the Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky in the Griveaux affair in 2020.

In July 2023, as a member of the legal team of the Senegalese opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, he accused the Senegalese government of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court over the deadly 2023 Senegalese protests.

In response, the Senegalese authorities issued an international arrest warrant against him; he was arrested in August 2023 after entering the country clandestinely and deported to France after spending two nights in prison.

Branco was the legal advisor of Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky who, in February 2020, disseminated an explicit video that led to the resignation of French deputy and Paris mayoral candidate Benjamin Griveaux.

Branco voiced his support for Pavlensky's actions in a way that caused speculation that he himself had played a role in the affair.

Rejecting the advice of the French Bar Association to resign due to his proximity to the events in question, Branco continued as part of the defence team of Pavlensky when the latter was arrested on charges of invasion of privacy and publishing sexually explicit images without consent.