René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration (Human Rights in History)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: 2nd ed., 5/2/2013
EAN 9781107032569, ISBN10: 1107032563
Hardcover, 397 pages, 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.3 cm
Language: English
Through the life of one extraordinary man, this biography reveals what the term human rights meant to the men and women who endured two world wars, and how this major political and intellectual movement ultimately inspired and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin was a man of his generation, committed to moving from war to peace through international law, and whose work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. His life crossed all the major events of the first seventy years of the twentieth century, and illustrates the hopes, aspirations, failures and achievements of an entire generation. It shows how today's human rights regimes emerged from the First World War as a pacifist response to that catastrophe and how, after 1945, human rights became a way to go beyond the dangers of absolute state sovereignty, helping to create today's European project.
Introduction to the English edition
Part I. In the Shadow of the Great War
1. Family and education, 1887–1914
2. The Great War and its aftermath
3. Cassin in Geneva
4. From nightmare to reality
1936–1940
Part II. The Jurist of Free France
5. Free France
1940–41
6. World war
1941–43
7. Restoring the Republican legal order
the 'Comité Juridique'
8. Freeze frame
René Cassin in 1944
Part III. The Struggle for Human Rights
9. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
origins and echoes
10. The vice-president of the Conseil d'Etat, 1944–1960
11. A Jewish life
Conclusion
An essay on sources.