René Cassin

René Samuel Cassin was born in Bayonne into a Sephardic Jewish merchant family. Studying law and letters at Aix-en-Provence and Paris, he completed his doctorate in 1914. Drafted as an infantry officer into World War I, Cassin was severely wounded by shrapnel at the Battle of the Meuse in October 1914, requiring multiple surgeries and leaving him permanently disabled. This trauma shaped his lifelong mission to champion wounded veterans and construct an international legal order to outlaw aggressive war.

During the interwar period, Cassin served as a French delegate to the League of Nations and founded the Federal Union of Mutilated and Disabled Veterans. When France fell to Nazi Germany in June 1940, Cassin was among the first prominent jurists to heed Charles de Gaulle's appeal, escaping to London aboard a British ship. As General Counsel to the Free French government, he drafted the foundational legal statutes of Free France, while twenty-nine members of his own family were murdered in Nazi extermination camps.

Appointed to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights after World War II, Cassin worked closely with Eleanor Roosevelt to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1948. Cassin organized the declaration into four foundational pillars: personal rights, civil and political rights, social and economic rights, and the international order. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968, Cassin used the prize money to establish the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg. His remains were transferred to the Panthéon in Paris in 1987.