Bassiouni was integral to creation of International Criminal Court
He prosecuted war criminals in Yugoslavia and most recently led an inquiry in Bahrain
Sharif Bassiouni, an Egyptian-American law professor who died on Monday in Chicago, left behind a very impressive career and legacy. Bassiouni helped create the International Criminal Court in 1998 after having spent decades investigating human rights abuses from apartheidera South Africa to the former Yugoslavia. He died from cancer at his home in Chicago at the age of 79.
Bassiouni was “the father of criminal law,” more than two often called international although his dozen books and 256 scholarly articles touched on subjects including citizens’ arrests, juvenile delinquency, international extradition and the Islamic criminal justice system.
Much of his work concerned the creation of a world court for international crimes, a venue with jurisdiction over genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Such a court had been a pipe dream since the close of the First World War and had existed in temporary form only when Nazi leaders were tried in Nuremberg after the Second World War.
Yet interest in a global court grew after the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in The Hague in 1993 to prosecute crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars.
Bassiouni was appointed chairman of a United Nations commission charged with researching the crimes.
He led a team that gathered evidence that would be used to indict military and political leaders such as Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb convicted of genocide and other charges in 2016.
Bassiouni’s work frightened some political leaders who were afraid he would “move too quickly to charge Serb and possibly Croatian leaders with war crimes.”
The tribunal, he later said, was underfunded and underambitious. But it and a similar tribunal, created in response to the Rwandan genocide, laid the groundwork for the International Criminal Court.
That body was formed out of a 1998 gathering in Rome, during which Bassiouni chaired a UN drafting committee by day and spent his evenings working on a book about crimes against humanity.
A resulting treaty that created the court was endorsed by 120 nations and entered into force in 2002, without support from the United States.
Bassiouni was crucial to the passage of the treaty, said Leila Sadat, a professor of international criminal law at Washington University in St Louis who participated in the gathering.
“It took a network of thousands of people all over the world, but for the work of Sharif, it would not have happened,” she said.
“He had an understanding of criminology, and how international institutions work, that was unmatched by anybody.”
Mahmoud Sharif Bassiouni was born in Cairo on December 9, 1937.
His father was an Egyptian diplomat, and his grandfather — a president of the Egyptian senate — fought during Egypt’s 1919 revolt against British occupation.
Bassiouni graduated from Indiana University’s law school in 1964 and received a master’s degree and doctorate in law, respectively, from John Marshall Law School in Chicago and George Washington University.
Bassiouni was appointed to a score of UN commissions and was a frequent consultant to the US government, including during the Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979.
Most recently, he chaired an independent inquiry in Bahrain that released a 2011 report about the treatment of antigovernment protesters.
“I can place my little grain of sand and add to that very thin veneer of civilisation,” he told the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1992.
“I’m a very firm believer in the incremental approach; things change because individuals move their little grain of sand.”