- Person
- René Cassin
- Lived
- 1887–1976
- Field
- Human rights law
- From
- French
The story
René Cassin was born in Bayonne in 1887 and had just earned his doctorate in law when the First World War broke out. Mobilised in 1914 as a corporal, he led a small assault unit and on 12 October 1914 was gravely wounded by machine-gun fire at Saint-Mihiel. He was treated at Antibes and received the Croix de Guerre with palm and the Médaille militaire, but his injuries ended his military service and caused him pain for the rest of his life.
Discharged as a war invalid, he returned to teaching law at Aix-en-Provence and Marseille. Out of solidarity with his former comrades, he devoted much of the next two decades to veterans and war victims. From 1917 he helped create one of the very first departmental associations of war victims, and in 1918 he founded the French Federation of Disabled War Veterans, which he served as president or honorary president until 1940. From 1922 he was president of the Union fédérale des Mutilés et Veuves de Guerre, a federation of disabled veterans and war widows.
He used his legal training to change the law. While teaching at the University of Lille, where he became a professor in 1920, he drafted laws to help war victims find employment and saw them through to a vote. He also studied the case law on war pensions and on the adoption of war orphans as wards of the nation, publishing a study of the subject in the mid-1920s.
In 1930 he won passage of the law establishing the retraite du combattant, a retirement pension for veterans who had served in combat. France's Ministry of the Armed Forces notes that until 1940 he got several laws passed for the benefit of war victims. His concern reached beyond France: in 1926 he founded the International Conference of Associations of Disabled War Veterans, bringing together veterans' groups from different countries, and served as its permanent reporter until the Second World War.
The Nobel Committee later described this work as one of the practical outlets he devised for his humanitarian instincts after the war. Decades later the same jurist became the person most responsible for drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, work that brought him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968.
Why it matters
Cassin's laws gave disabled veterans and war widows jobs and pensions, easing the hardship of families shattered by the First World War.
About René Cassin
French-Jewish jurist, war-wounded veteran and Free French lawyer who was a principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Nobel Peace Prize 1968.
More about René Cassin
- René Cassin helped rebuild French law after liberationRené Cassin was vice-president of France's Council of State from 1944 to 1960, chaired the committee preparing the 1958 constitution and sat on the Constitutional Council.
- René Cassin used his Nobel money for human rightsRené Cassin used the money from his 1968 Nobel Peace Prize to found the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 1969.
- René Cassin helped write the Declaration of Human RightsFrench jurist René Cassin was a principal drafter of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, later presided over the European Court of Human Rights and won the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize.
- René Cassin worked to protect France's war orphansRené Cassin served as vice-president of France's High Council for Wards of the Nation, which looked after children orphaned by the First World War.
Sources
- René Cassin Ordre de la Libération
- René Cassin Les Chemins de la Mémoire, French Ministry of the Armed Forces
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.