Henri Donnedieu de Vabres

Henri Donnedieu de Vabres (; 8 July 1880 – 14 February 1952) was a French jurist who took part in the Nuremberg trials after World War II and a president of the AIDP. He was the primary French judge during the proceedings, with Robert Falco as his alternate.

Biography

Donnedieu was born in Nîmes to a Protestant and bourgeois family. He also became director of the Paris Institute of Criminology. Later in 1947, he would again submit his idea before the United Nations' Committee on the Progressive Development of International Law and its Codification.

In 1935 Donnedieu accepted an invitation to Berlin from Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and later Governor-General of occupied Poland. They debated the idea of an international criminal court. Frank was later one of the accused tried at Nuremberg, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Donnedieu was the only one of the trial judges who was not a professional judge; this is likely because judges under the Vichy regime would have had to swear allegiance to the regime, whereas Donnedieu as a professor did not. His grandson Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres served as France's Minister of Culture from 2004 to 2007.