HUMAN RIGHTS | Defending human dignity
23 October 2008
René Cassin: A Profile
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights reflects the legal expertise and craftsmanship of Nobel Prize winner Rene Cassin, a lifelong advocate of human rights. A founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Cassin called the declaration “a beacon of hope for humanity.”
Rene Cassin was born in 1887 in Bayonne, France. He was educated at the Lyceé in Nice and at the University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1908, he received degrees in humanities and in law. He took first place in a competitive examination given by the university’s law faculty, and in 1914 he earned a doctorate in juridical, economic, and social sciences.
Cassin began his legal career in 1909 at the Court of Paris and practiced there until he was called to fight in World War I. He served in the infantry and was severely wounded. So bad was his condition that the military doctors operated on Cassin only at the urgent pleas of his mother, who was a nurse at the field station where he was treated. Cassin survived, but the pain from his wounds would trouble him for the rest of his life.
“I avoided dealing with subjects of an avowedly political nature, even though the technical law of contracts and obligations is of course dominated by moral principles, notably that of good faith,” said Cassin of his early professional life. But World War I changed his perceptions: “That war put its indelible and unmistakable stamp on me, as it did on many of my contemporaries.”
Returning to civilian life, Cassin married and took up a position as a law professor at the University of Aix-en-Provence. In 1918, he founded the French Federation of Disabled War Veterans. In 1929, he became chairman of fiscal and civil law at the University of Paris, where he remained until his retirement in 1960.
A firm believer in the ideals of the French Revolution, Cassin left France during World War II to serve as an adviser to Charles de Gaulle in London. He held numerous posts within the Free French government, including commissioner of public instruction.
Cassin represented France at the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations, from 1924 to 1938 and at the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932-34. He was appointed a delegate to the United Nations in 1946 and was a founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
Cassin was a vice chairman of the first U.N. Commission on Human Rights and later its chairman. Though he was an international expert on human rights, Cassin recognized the difficult challenges ahead: “As a consequence of these hesitations and of the vague character of such innovations, the Commission on Human Rights itself had doubts from the beginning about its role and its functions in general.”
The commission was given an outline prepared by the U.N. Secretariat as a starting point for modifying some of its articles, expanding others and creating entirely new ones. Substantial parts of Cassin’s draft became part of the final Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “As corollaries to the right of every individual to life and to full participation in society, the Declaration incorporated in the list of human rights the right to work and a certain number of economic, social, and cultural rights,” he said of the document.
Although the General Assembly’s Third Committee (handling social, humanitarian, and cultural affairs) and the full General Assembly debated and revised the draft, much of Cassin’s language survived the lengthy editorial process and remains in the document today. Upon the Universal Declaration’s passage, Cassin remarked that it would provide a “beacon of hope for humanity.”
Cassin, already regarded as one of the top international legal minds, was tapped again to serve his country and international juridical organizations. He was vice president of the France’s Council of State, the ultimate authority on administrative law cases. From 1960 to 1970, he served on his country’s Constitutional Court, which rules on the constitutionality of laws passed by the legislature. In addition, he was president of the Court of Arbitration at The Hague (Netherlands) and a member, and ultimately president of the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg, France.
Cassin won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. Marking the occasion, he said: “The time has come to proclaim that, for the establishment of peace and human dignity, each of us must work and fight to the last.” Cassin died in Paris in 1976.
