The European Convention on Human Rights Family Tree

During World War ll millions of people from marginalised groups were murdered by the state.

The Holocaust led to the creation of the modern international human rights framework.

Hersch Lauterpacht influenced Universal Declaration of Human Rights and European Convention on Human Rights.

“The claim to equality before the law is in a substantial sense the most fundamental of the rights of man.”

– Hersch Lauterpacht

Philippe Sands, human rights lawyer, describes Hersch Lauterpacht as

“the father of the modern human rights movement”.

Monsieur René Cassin; a French Jewish jurist, French delegate to the League of Nations and President European Court of Human Rights 1965-1968.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights led to over 70 regional and international human rights treaties.

“There must be no question of permitting any diminution of the universality of the Declaration. There are fundamental liberties and rights common to all human beings, without possible discrimination. It is the most oppressed, the weakest of these individuals who would be threatened by any attempts to fragmentise the effective scope of the Declaration.”

– Monsieur René Cassin

“It was first and foremost as an architect of an international legal system that René Cassin accomplished his life’s work.”

– Guido Raimondi, President European Court of Human Rights, 2015 -2019.

David Maxwell Fyfe; a British Conservative Attorney General, Home Secretary, Lord Chancellor and a Prosecutor at Nuremburg Trials.

“I had the good fortune to have Lauterpacht’s personal help when I was preparing the European Convention on Human Rights.”

– Maxwell Fyfe

“We shamelessly borrowed many ideas from Hersch Lauterpacht’s framework of the rights of man.”

– John Harcourt Barrington British barrister who worked on the development of the European Court of Human Rights.

Francesca Klug; a British Jewish legal Policy academic and visiting Professor at London School of Economics.

“we lacked a sufficient ethical framework to address the inevitable conflicts and tensions, including between disadvantaged and dispossessed groups… I also realised how useful human rights could be in areas like social services where I was working and where decisions are taken every day that could benefit from human rights standards, particularly in a context of unequal power relations between individuals and their social workers or carers.”

– Francesca Klug

Crimes against humanity are not isolated incidents, but mass crimes against civilians, systematic in nature, committed by a state.
Human beings as individuals had minimum rights under international law for the first time.

“his prominence and success … were due to his passion for justice, his devotion to the relief of suffering, his transparent sincerity and his gifts of persuasion, both in writing and in speech.”

– Lord Macnair

Genocide is the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group, a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

“Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual.”

– Raphael Lemkin

The Convention Against Torture aims to prevent torture and other acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment around the world.

“the judgments at Nuremberg became his lodestar and he determined to devote his life to reviving their legacy.”

– Geoffrey Robertson

The Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out the civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children.

“The Convention on the Rights of the Child is based upon the best interests of the child. The convention tells us to look at the child’s right to participate in decisions affecting them through a child’s eyes, and to provide information in a format appropriate to a child.” ”

– Geraldine van Beuren