Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni is a hell of a storyteller. Early last semester an audience of students, faculty, lawyers, and judges packed into a lecture hall at DePaul University to hear him describe his role in digging the foundation for the world’s first permanent international criminal court, an independent judicial body that may one day try the world’s worst criminals. It was standing room only even before he made his entrance and worked his way to the podium, glad-handing friends, colleagues, and the delegation of Egyptian jurists that filled the first three rows. A photographer roamed around snapping away for posterity.
Bassiouni, who also served as the UN’s chief war-crimes investigator in Bosnia, recounted a long list of halfhearted attempts and utter failures to prevent genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity or to punish those who commit them. He said that after the Holocaust the world declared “never again,” then failed to do anything about the millions murdered in Cambodia, Liberia, El Salvador, Uganda, Chile, Bangladesh. “It is almost as if we have gotten to the point where anything under 100,000 persons killed doesn’t even make the front pages.”
“There are a lot of us that feel really privileged that he’s around,” says Barry Kellman, who codirects the International Criminal Justice and Weapons Control Center, which he and Bassiouni formed to focus on arms control in the Middle East. “But I’m sure that some people are a little jealous. This is academia after all, and it’s a pretty petty place. He’s a very strong-willed personality, but I wouldn’t expect any less given his accomplishments.”
Ask him about his past and he’ll talk with an odd mixture of enthusiastic pride and excessive humility. Both of his grandfathers, he says, were high-ranking lawyers and statesmen–one an aristocrat, the other a populist. His maternal grandfather, Mohammed Khattab, who died before Bassiouni was born, was a counsel to the Egyptian royal palace under the Ottoman Empire and married an Austrian woman related to the Hapsburgs. His paternal grandfather and namesake, Mahmoud Bassiouni, was one of the leaders of a popular revolt against the British colonial government in 1919, for which he was arrested and sentenced to death. The conviction was overturned, says Bassiouni. “The Brits were smart enough not to execute him.” Mahmoud went on to help draft Egypt’s first constitution in 1922 and to serve as president of its senate until his death in 1944. A street in downtown Cairo is named after him.
Barry Kellman believes these memories are defining. “It is astoundingly important to him,” he says. “I think it goes back to old-fashioned notions of heroism, of loyalty to his regiment, courage under fire. He brings it up with such pride.” Rob Krug, who spent ten years in the army reserves, interviewed for a job as Bassiouni’s research assistant when he was in his second year of law school at DePaul. “When I went to talk to him, he didn’t ask me anything about grades or what my LSAT score was or anything,” he says. “All he did was talk army to me. ‘What unit are you in? Are you an infantryman? What rank are you?’ Then he was like, OK, you can work for me.”
When he was discharged in January 1957, Bassiouni returned to France to resume his studies. But he’d become an outspoken supporter of Algerian independence, which led–he’s chary with details–to his being escorted by the police to the Swiss border.
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For a brief time he was enrolled at the University of Geneva, where he studied under Jean Graven, president of the International Association of Penal Law, an organization that advocated the outlandish idea of a permanent international criminal court. At the time Graven was serving as an adviser to Haile Selassie, drafting an Ethiopian penal code, and Bassiouni helped him. The code included provisions on genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and Bassiouni found the work intellectually stimulating. “But it was something far too big, far too extraordinary for me to conceive. I could not emotionally relate to it because I had not witnessed the terrible tragedies I have witnessed since then.”
