René Cassin and Human Rights

Edmund RydenAssociate Professor, Department of Law, Fu Jen Catholic University

René Cassin and Human Rights: From the Great War to the Universal Declaration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 (pp. i-xxiii; 1-376; 42 b/w photos)by Jay Winter and Antoine ProstISBN 978-1-107-65570-6 (pbk); 978-1-107-03256-9 (hbk)(original in French: Antoine Prost et Jay Winter, René Cassin et les droits de l’homme, Paris: Fayard, 2011)

Following the publication of Mary Ann Glendon’s excellent book on Eleanor Roosevelt (A World Made New, New York: Random House, 2001) and Clinton T. Curle’s less well-known book on John Humphrey (Humanité, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), Prost and Winter’s book on René Cassin is an excellent addition to understanding the persons who worked so hard to draw up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is particularly useful in that while Cassin’s contribution to the Declaration is acknowledged by all, the role he actually played has been a matter of controversy, in part because he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968 largely on account of his work in drawing up the Declaration.

Yet, this book is not only about the Declaration; it is about Cassin’s life as a whole. Indeed, more pages are devoted to the rest of his life than to the Declaration. In that it differs from Glendon’s life of Eleanor Roosevelt. Furthermore, the authors lack Glendon’s ability to write a good story.

The uneven nature of the book suggests to me the image of driving from A to B along highways and byways. At times the car is caught in intricate twists and turns with minute details about various sessions of obscure meetings of the French civil service; at times the driver stops and takes a break, notably in Chapter 8, entitled “Freeze frame: René Cassin in 1944”; at times we rush through events as on the highway, which is the case in Chapter 9 when we

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finally encounter the Declaration. Of course, the authors are justified to a certain extent in treating the Declaration in this way since they presuppose that the reader is familiar with Morsink’s painstaking study of the process of drafting (cf. Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). One could also note the excellent, earlier work edited by Eide and Alfredsson (The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), that goes through the Declaration article by article.

Yet, one cannot help but feel rather rushed by Prost and Winter’s work. For instance, it is well known that Cassin proposed that military service should be included in article 28 and that he later used the image of the portico of a Greek Temple to describe the Declaration (see illustration in Glendon’s book, p. 172). One might expect in a book on Cassin that there would be further explanation of these points. In fact neither is even mentioned. That is not to say that the book provides no help. Indeed, by stressing Cassin’s status as a wounded soldier (in 1914), and his long-term help for the victims of war from 1918 onwards, it is clear that military service was something he held in high regard. The book does not, however, say much about his architectural interests, but it does note his constant effort to organize and explain the law. He was able to grasp the way laws were related to each other and was an excellent teacher of the law, precisely because he kept in mind the overall framework as well as the small details.

Having said that, there are three issues on which the book is very explicit. The first is why Cassin was involved in human rights. In his work for the war-wounded, he stressed that states should help them not out of compassion but because it was the right of the wounded soldiers and their families. He placed the rights of them as individuals before those of the state. With the rise of Hitler in Germany he also saw that the state’s claim to absolute sovereignty had to be curtailed, and this could be done in the name of the rights of the individual guaranteed by their universality, backed up by a strong, universal organization. His work with the League of Nations showed him that rights had to challenge the dominance of state sovereignty.

The second issue is the one on which Humphrey criticized him, namely that Cassin seemed to claim too much for his own role in the Declaration. True, by 1968, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Eleanor Roosevelt was already dead, but Humphrey was not. Winter and Proust note that if Cassin

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had a flaw it was this: he wanted to be recognized. As a founding member of the Free French movement, he expected a post as Minister in the post-war government: it was denied him. His name was proposed for the Nobel Prize several times but the dossier which led to his winning it was actually compiled by his own secretary. He also asked to be buried in the Pantheon in Paris, which did happen several years after his death. But he sought recognition not for himself alone. His Nobel Prize money, for instance, went to the founding of an institute to teach human rights in Strasbourg.

The third issue that Winter and Proust handle with great skill is his Jewish identity. He was an assimilated French Jew who identified more with France than Judaism, though he did not hide his identity. It was the persecution of the Jews launched in 1933, including of his own family, which led him to stress his Jewishness and to lead the Alliance Israélite Universelle from 1943 until his death. What is fascinating here is how he lived Judaism without being a religious Jew in any normal sense, and, while being very supportive of the new state of Israel, without ever wishing to emigrate there or leave France since he fervently believed in the universal values of the French Republic.

While I highly recommend this book, I do not expect most readers to read all of it. For one thing it is uneven in style, with parts clearly derived from a French original in terms of grammar and vocabulary, but also in terms of the minutiae of administrative documentation. For instance, we learn what Cassin was doing in various committees dealing with Algeria, but nothing about the larger context of why there was a civil war in Algeria, something that perhaps a French audience would understand. If nothing else, this shows the danger of ‘faithful’ translation. In some ways one needs to rethink a book when it is translated because the new readers may lack the background assumptions the original readers take for granted.

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