Rene Cassin

Rene Cassin
(1887-1976)


French jurist, president of the European Court of Human Rights, and principal author of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Man. He won the 1968 Nobel Prize for Peace.
The son of a Jewish merchant, Cassin studied law before entering the French Army in World War I. During the war he sustained a severe abdominal wound, the effects of which troubled him for the rest of his life. He later became a professor of international law in Paris and then, from 1924 to 1938, served as a French delegate to the League of Nations assemblies and disarmament conferences in Geneva. After the fall of France in June 1940, he joined General Charles de Gaulle in London and served as a key member of the Free French government in exile.

After World War II Cassin became president of the Council of State (Conseil d'Etat), France's highest administrative court, and held other high legal and administrative offices in France. Internationally, he helped found the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1944 and was a French delegate to UNESCO from 1945 to 1952. A French representative to the United Nations from 1946 to 1968, he was president of the UN Commission on the Rights of Man (1947-48) and helped to draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man. From 1965 to 1968 he was president of the European Court of Human Rights.

Cassin received the Nobel Prize for Peace on Dec. 20, 1968, the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the UN Declaration. He was also a Zionist and campaigner for Jewish rights and was president of the Alliance Israelite in France.