Antonio Cassese will be rightly remembered for having taken international criminal law out of the classroom and into the courtroom.  As the first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia he contributed to the establishment of an institution which had a resonance far beyond the important trials that it conducted. It became clear that the international system was capable of hunting down and trying those accused of horrendous crimes no matter what their rank or influence. He carried this determination forward, first in his role as Chair of the of the UN International Commission of Inquiry in Darfur (2005), and later in his work as President of the Special Court for Lebanon, finding time to offer constructive suggestions on the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court. But Cassese was not content to work on the foundations and efficiency of such international courts. He played a singular role in shaping the international criminal law itself. His judgments and books on International Law (2005) and International Criminal Law (2008) together with the publication of his selected papers The Human Dimension of International Law (2008) reveal exactly how he was seeking to develop international criminal law in new directions. But this quest was not a solo project, by establishing and leading the Journal of International Criminal Justice Cassese nurtured the growth of a dedicated scholarly community committed to building this new legal order.

Cassese’s determination to change the world he found himself in was not however confined to international criminal law. Those of us who met him when he was teaching at the University of Florence and the European University Institute remember that he applied his considerable talents and energy to working on a number of discrete human rights projects. While lecturing and writing on topics such as the Self-Determination of Peoples (1995) he was also working behind the scenes for a new protocol to ensure that the norms prohibiting torture and inhumane and degrading treatment would be monitored by what he called ‘international inspectors’. These dreams came true in the form of first, the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, and later in the form of the Optional Protocol to the Torture Convention.  Cassese found himself elected ‘Chief Inspector’ and presided over the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture with gusto. He relished finding secret torture chambers and vile implements of suffering. He personally unearthed such practices and again left many around the world worried that the Italian Professor might be coming their way. He personally translated human rights from a philosophy into guarantees that could be internationally monitored, not just through debates at the United Nations but through forensic detective work and engagement with both the victims and those that were responsible for their mistreatment. He controversially wrote up his experiences in his book Inhuman States: Imprisonment, Detention and Torture in Europe Today (1996). During this period he was also active on multiple projects related to enhancing human rights protection by the European Union. As a member of the Comité des Sages he published Leading by example: a human rights agenda for the European Union for the year 2000, a report which in turn gave momentum to the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU and the Accession of the EU to the European Convention on Human Rights.  He was also one of the founders of the European Journal of International Law.

There was during all this time a genuine determination on his part to make people care about the plight of others and to give everyone the tools to understand how they could get involved. In addition to multiple newspaper articles Cassese produced a series of books aimed at a wider audience. These included: International Law in a Divided World (1986); Violence and Law in the Modern Age (1988); Terrorism, Politics, and the Law: The Achille Lauro Affair (1989); Human Rights in a Changing World (1990); Il sogno dei diritti umani (2008); Voci contro le barbarie. La battaglia per i diritti umani attraverso i suoi protagonisti (2009); I diritti umani oggi (2009); and L'esperienza del male. Guerra, tortura, genocidio, terrorismo alla sbarra. Conversazione con Giorgio Acquaviva (2011).  One reviewer suggested that he was a marvellous ‘popularizer’ of international law. He hated the idea that he might be considered by some to be dumbing down the issues, but came to see that his non-scholarly voice could be taken just as seriously. These books won as many prizes as his more academic studies.

Despite these mammoth achievements in terms of international institution building, the development of international law, and the prodigious output of scholarly and other publications, Cassese deeply admired other international lawyers that he considered to display qualities that he genuinely aspired to. His book and recent article on Röling take the form of conversations and reveal Cassese’s genuine humility and desire to be an even better scholar and lawyer. The technique he developed in The Tokyo Trial and Beyond: Reflections of a Peacemonger (1993)  was more recently reprised in his Five Masters of International Law: Conversations with R-J. Dupuy, E. Jiménez de Aréchaga, R. Jennings, L. Henkin and O. Schachter (2011). Cassese  taught many of us, not only how to study hard, but also that he himself was not done with studying and that we all need role models no matter how much we may think we have achieved.