Simone Veil was born in the French town of Nice in 1927. In 1944, in the course of the Second World War, she was deported with her mother and a sister to Auschwitz. Her father and another brother also disappeared one day, never again to be heard of. After being freed in May 1945, she settled in Paris, where she graduated in Law and gained a Master´s degree from the Institute of Political Studies. In 1957, she earned a post in the magistracy after passing public examinations and became attaché to the Ministry of Justice. In 1969, she became technical advisor at the same ministry, and between 1970 and 1974 she was general secretary of the Supreme Council of the Judiciary. In 1974, during Valery Giscard d´Estaing´s term of office as President, she became the first female minister of the Fifth Republic when she was appointed Minister of Health and Social Security, a post she held for five years, during which time she modernized hospital organisation. In the 1979 European Parliamentary elections, she headed the voting list for the Union for French Democracy and was appointed President of the first European Parliament elected by universal suffrage. She held the post until February 1982, when she moved on to take up the presidency of the European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs.

In the 1984 European elections, she headed the list of the liberal-conservative alliance and became president of the liberal group. In 1989, she was elected European Member of Parliament for the "Centre pour l´Europe" and was a member of that Parliament´s Commission for Political Affairs. After Edouard Balladur´s 1993 election victory, she was appointed Minister of State for Social Affairs, Health and the City Affairs, holding the post until 1995. After quitting this post, she was candidate to be the first European Ombudsman, but lost the election on the second round of voting to Finland´s Jacob Söderman. Since 1998 she has been a member of France´s Constitutional Council; since 2001, she has also been president of the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah (Holocaust), which was founded that year, and which she is still president of. She has written two works, L´Adoption, donnés médicales, psychologiques et sociales (1969) and Les hommes aussi s´en souviennent (2004).

She is a Knight of France´s National Order of Merit and is a member of the Order of the British Empire. The Charlemagne Award, from the city of Aix-la-Chapelle (1981), the Truman Peace Prize (1991) and the World Health Organisation´s Gold Medal for the Health for All programme (1997) figure amongst her accolades. She has also been awarded fourteen honoris causa doctorates, including those from the universities of Princetown, Georgetown, Yale, Cambridge and Glasgow.