René Cassin

Origins and early life

René Samuel Cassin was born in Bayonne on 5 October 1887 into an old family of Jewish tradition, and he called himself a son of three frontiers: Bayonne by birth, Alsace through his mother and Nice through his father, a wine merchant. He took his doctorate in law in 1914, the year he was called up, and on 12 October 1914, leading a raiding party near Saint-Mihiel, he was gravely wounded by machine-gun fire.

Work and career

Back in civilian life he taught law at Aix, Lille and from 1929 Paris, led the Union fédérale of disabled veterans, and from 1924 to 1938 sat in the French delegation to the League of Nations. Refusing the armistice, he sailed from Saint-Jean-de-Luz on 24 June 1940, joined General de Gaulle in London as the jurist of Free France, and drafted the agreement that Churchill and de Gaulle signed on 7 August 1940. In 1943 de Gaulle asked him to take charge of the Alliance israélite universelle, the Jewish educational network he then led until his death.

From 1946 he sat on the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and was the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in Paris on 10 December 1948, where he won the word universal in place of international. He was vice-president of the Council of State from 1944 to 1960, then a member of the Constitutional Council, and president of the European Court of Human Rights from 1965 to 1968.

Recognition

The Nobel Peace Prize of 1968, which he did not share, honoured his struggle to ensure the rights of man as stipulated in the UN Declaration, and with the prize money he founded the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1969. He died in Paris on 20 February 1976, and on 5 October 1987, the hundredth anniversary of his birth, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon.