Juan Branco

Juan Branco (born August 26, 1989) is a French-Spanish academic, intellectual and lawyer. Formed at Yale University and the London Film School, he's believed to have triggered the adaptation of Cosmopolis to film, and is known for having worked with Jean-Luc Godard. As an academic, he practiced as a Senior Research Fellow in international law at the Max Planck Society and was a visiting researcher at the Yale Law School, a visiting faculty at Yale University, and holds a doctorate in Law from l'Ecole normale supérieure. In parallel to his academic career, Juan Branco has been part of the Wikileaks and Julian Assange defense team, under the direction of Baltasar Garzon, after having worked for the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court as a special assistant and liaison officer and served in the French minister of foreign affairs immediate office. He has published on politics of representation, cinema, contemporary politics, political theory and international criminal law. Relying on a reinterpretation of the Hobbesian social contract theory, he authored a critical review of the first trial of the International Criminal Court to have reached a final conviction, suggesting that the ICC was the creation of a "cosmopolitism of the chiefs" brought by the transformations of the Westphalian world. He has also written on the digital revolution and its effects on cultural industries, proposing a new financing model for the cinema industry based on a wide democratization of cultural access, on mass violences, surveillance and individual freedoms in the digital age. Juan Branco emerged as one of the figures of the French civil society's digital rights defense during the HADOPI law debates. In April 2009, he authored a letter signed by part of the French cinema intelligentsia advocating against HADOPI. The initiative, supported fifty personalities, including Catherine Deneuve, Chantal Ackerman or Christophe Honoré, was the first expression of defiance of the French cultural world against the proposed device and, in an unexpected outcome, triggered the repeal of the law in the French Parliament and the subsequent resignation of the Minister of culture and of the Minister in charge of the relations with the parliament. Chosen as an advisor to François Hollande during the 2012 French presidential campaign and as the chief of staff of the upcoming culture minister Aurélie Filippetti, he conceived and defended a radical reform of French exception culturelle based on the repeal of HADOPI law and the decriminalization of non-commercial Peer-to-peer cultural exchanges. Following an intense lobbying campaign by cultural industries representatives, his revocation was announced the day after the elections, triggering the abandonment of the reform plans and an important outcry from the civil society. As part of the Indignados movement, he later on advised the Partido X on European policies during the 2014 European elections Campaign. In May 2015, his critical narrative of the 2005 French riots trial was adapted to screen. The trial outcome triggered an important polemic and was perceived as the sign of the existence of a "judicial apartheid" in France. As the lawyer of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in France during the 2015 NSA Espionnage revelations, he publicly represented the organization and interfaced with French authorities in Assange's tentative to obtain asylum in France. As a journalist, Juan Branco covered the Kivu conflict and the Central African Republic Civil War for Le Monde diplomatique and Les Inrockuptibles. According to David Cronenberg and Don deLillo, Juan Branco triggered the adaptation of Cosmopolis to film.