In the summer of 1947, the Institute for International Law reconvened after a ten-year hiatus. For decades the self-appointed tribune of European “civilization” and the legal conscience of humanity, the Institute now hoped to retake its former role. Given its prominence in the rhetoric of the Allied new order during World War II, the new concept of human rights – though international lawyers had not even flirted with it before – stood as the first item on their agenda. The atmosphere was one of bitter disappointment: Whatever the idealism of wartime dreams, the sad but obvious fact was that when it came time to enact a peaceful order – most flagrantly in the Dumbarton Oaks documents, in which human rights did not even figure – a theory of sovereign power politics ruled. As for the United Nations Charter, the great powers had it adorned with the phrase human rights without providing either any definition of its values or any institutional means for their defense. The international lawyers of Europe were, they believed, perhaps the last best hope for making good on what now seemed like broken promises.

“Neither the Charter nor diplomatic wrangling is reassuring,” noted Charles de Visscher, Belgian international lawyer and judge (1946–1952) on the International Court of Justice who prepared the Institute’s report and proposal on human rights, in his opening remarks. “International organization,” he complained indignantly, “looks like a mere bureaucracy with neither direction nor soul, unable to open to humanity the horizons of a true international community.” A new international law, based on human rights and theorized and implemented by the caste of jurists, might, however, provide the “morally-inspired salvation” that the world clearly needed. Now comes a very curious statement: “Since the end of the second world war, a powerful current of ideas has arisen against the nameless abuses that we have witnessed: it is the personalist conception of society and power. The intellectual elites of all of the countries with liberal and democratic traditions are rallying to this conception.” According to de Visscher, this “personalist conception” alone could provide the basis of an authentic turn to human rights and guide the response of law to Machiavellian power.