Inaugural Letter

Address to the General Assembly

[The following letter was originally prepared in three languages: English in section 1, Spanish in section 2, and French in section 3.]

1.

First of all, I want to apologize for not speaking German, but Frédérique Ferrand spoke such excellent German on Wednesday that she spoke for two.

The General Assembly of the International Association made me yesterday the great honour of appointing me as its new President.

I do not know whether it is a good idea or not, but I shall do my best not to disappoint your trust and to fulfill all the duties that this honour requires.

I shall do it with your indispensable help, as we have always done. You did not elect a single man, but a group — I must say a team — and I may say a wonderful team. I know I can count on the support of Oscar Chase, Michele Taruffo, Masahisa Deguchi, Eduardo Oteiza, Janet Walker, Neil Andrews, Burkhard Hess and Manuel Ortells Ramos, as well as yours, and especially the help of the members of the Council, which we decided to increase from 20 to 25 members in order to improve its representativeness and particularly to make more room for female colleagues as well as young colleagues.

The history of our Association is the history of a collective challenge. Generation after generation, for over sixty years, since the Association was founded in Florence, we have been writing together this history like a novel chain.

I will not hide my emotion. I measure the weight of the responsibility entrusted to me.

I measure it when I look to the past so well described by Federico Carpi in Ghent some years ago; when I remember the names of Enrico Redenti, Niceto Alcalà-Zamora y Castillo, Mauro Cappelletti, Marcel Storme, Federico Carpi and Peter Gottwald — all these prominent personalities who led our Association. All of them, together with their colleagues of the Presidium and the Council, worked hard, most often at their own expense, investing a great deal of time and energy in preparing congresses, editing the bulletin, developing membership, and carrying out many other tasks.

A special thanks to the honorary members of the Presidium: José Carlos Barbosa Moreira, Ada Pellegrini Grinover, Yasuhei Taniguchi and Keith Uff.

Thanks to them, and thanks to the colleagues who have accepted and will accept to organize such important world congresses and regional conferences. Thank you very much, Burkhard, all your colleagues of the Organizing Committee, without forgetting your administrative team, especially Henriette Beisel — and without forgetting Mrs. Hess, because I know how organizing such a congress requires time and energy, often to the detriment of family life.

Thanks to you, thanks to them, the Association has consolidated over the years, spread throughout the world, and increased its activities. Today our Association has nearly four hundred members worldwide, representing more than fifty countries.

I did not personally know Redenti, Alcalà-Zamora, or Cappelletti, but I had the chance to work very closely with Marcel Storme, who was President when I became a member of the Association and a member of the Council; then with Federico Carpi and Peter Gottwald when I became Executive Secretary General. I learned a great deal from them. I hope that I will, in my turn, be able to transmit the memory and the invaluable knowledge they generously gave me.

2.

[AI-translated from Spanish]

I also measured the weight of the responsibilities entrusted to me when I look toward the future. In the message he wrote at the end of June, Federico Carpi told us that the future is in our hands and that we must ensure change in continuity. I believe this is true — both in the composition and in the activities of our Association.

Regarding its composition, continuity lies in the presence in the Presidium of our colleagues Michele Taruffo, Oscar Chase and Masahisa Deguchi; and in the presence on the Council of our colleagues José Roberto Dos Santos Bedaque, Frédérique Ferrand, Moon-hyuk Ho, Miklós Kengyel, Dimitri Maleshin, Vytautas Nekrošius, Walter H. Rechberger, Rolf Stürner, Piet Taelman, Alan Uzelac and Garry D. Watson.

Change lies in the arrival in the Presidium of our colleagues Janet Walker, Neil Andrews, Burkhard Hess, Manuel Ortells Ramos and Eduardo Oteiza. In this Presidium, the Vice-Presidents are Oscar Chase (North America), Masahisa Deguchi (Asia), Eduardo Oteiza (Latin America) and Michele Taruffo (Europe). Neil Andrews, Burkhard Hess, Manuel Ortells Ramos and Janet Walker form the Secretariat-General, with Manuel Ortells Ramos becoming Executive Secretary General and Burkhard Hess Treasurer of the Association after a short transition period.

Change also lies in the arrival on the Council of our colleagues Teresa Armenta Deus, Teresa Arruda Alvim Wambier, Paolo Biavati, Remo Caponi, Laura Ervo, Fernando Gascón Inchausti, Angela Ester Ledesma, Richard Markus, Remco van Rhee and Michael Stürner.

Regarding, secondly, its activities, continuity consists first and foremost in fidelity to the principles that led to the formation of the Association in the aftermath of the Second World War. Let us recall what Piero Calamandrei said in his final report at the First World Congress of Civil Procedural Law in Florence, from 30 September to 3 October 1950:

“Study, considered as a mission and as human cooperation, gives us the great support that we have experienced here, even during the congress. It is this permanence, this constant bond between men, even during periods in which weapons reach their most savage extremes. And even when war brutally divides peoples, above the conflict books continue, unknowingly, their dialogue at a distance. This fraternity, this solidarity persist despite and against everything, in the heavens of the spirit.”

Our responsibility is to nurture among proceduralists throughout the world — in mutual respect for their differences — the flame of solidarity, cooperation and friendship in order to promote a more humane and more democratic justice, more effective judicial protection while respecting the right to a fair trial.

Our Association must remain a great family, where shared ideals of justice are stronger than national, political or religious affiliations. In our common home, there is no space for nationalism, extremism, xenophobia or intolerance.

In this spirit, continuity also means organizing conferences next year in Buenos Aires in June and in Moscow in September; in 2013 in Greece; in 2014 in South Korea; and preparing the Fifteenth World Congress, for which our Association has promising contacts, especially with colleagues in Turkey. In the coming months we will provide further information. Many thanks to our friends Oteiza, Maleshin, Klamaris and Ho.

We will also make efforts to develop the Association in regions where it does not yet exist or remains underrepresented: Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and China.

As for change, it mainly consists in equipping ourselves with new tools for development. We have already begun modernizing the Association’s statutes during this congress and have created our International Journal of Civil Procedure, whose first issue was published by Intersentia a few days ago. Many thanks to Marcel Storme for his initiative, commitment and determination in this field.

We will continue with the design of a dynamic and interactive website, for which our colleague and friend Eduardo Oteiza has several ideas.

Our activities must also move in new directions, especially toward young proceduralists, who are the future of our Association. We must find ways to involve them more closely in our activities: for example, by creating a “Young Proceduralist” section in our journal, organizing doctoral and post-doctoral meetings, and perhaps awarding a prize to the best young proceduralists.

Of course, it is not easy — but movement is demonstrated by walking. Another direction could be the establishment of permanent commissions: working groups open to all members of the Association on a voluntary basis, dedicated to specific issues such as procedural terminology.

Congresses and conferences must not be our only horizon. We can — and must — explore these paths, even modestly, by working together. We are open to all ideas.

Rome needed much time to become Rome. Our Association also needs time. Its Remus and Romulus were named Enrico Redenti, Hans Schima, Adolf Schönke, Victor Fairén-Guillén, Robert Wyness Millar, Niceto Alcalà Zamora, Oscar de Cunha and Eduardo Couture.

3.

[AI-translated from French]

But in the immediate future, it is another path we shall take tomorrow — that of Strasbourg — and since I have today the opportunity to speak in my mother tongue, for which I warmly thank the organizers of the congress, I would like to say a few words about Strasbourg for two reasons.

The first is to reassure Burkhard, who, last Monday during the opening session of the congress, delicately expressed concern that organizing a visit to Strasbourg following a congress held in Heidelberg might be misunderstood. There is no reason for it to be so. Let him be reassured.

Strasbourg is certainly located in France, but it is a European city — home to institutions of both the European Union and the Council of Europe. The European character of Strasbourg is inscribed in its landscape, its monuments, the people who live there, the languages heard there, and the law taught at its Faculty.

This leads me to the second reason for speaking about Strasbourg, and this time I refer to Herbert Kronke. Last Monday, our colleague explained the good reasons why Heidelberg was an excellent choice for this 14th Congress of the Association, mentioning among those reasons the names of the great professors of international law and procedural law who have taught at Heidelberg since its foundation.

He will not mind if I add to his list the name of a professor of civil law of this fine university, well known to French jurists, whose work was popularized in France in the 19th century by two professors of civil law at the Faculty of Law of Strasbourg. They would later write their own treatise, which for several decades became the principal source of inspiration for the Court of Cassation, of which they became members.

At that time in the 19th century, the Napoleonic Code was still applicable in this part of Europe, and this German professor had commented on it using a new method that the two French professors subsequently adopted.

This professor from Heidelberg was Karl-Salomo Zachariae, and the two professors from Strasbourg were Charles Aubry and Charles Rau.

It so happens that the “Course of French Civil Law according to the method of Zachariae,” by Aubry and Rau, contained two parts: a first part entitled Theoretical French Civil Law and a second part entitled Practical French Civil Law, in which Aubry and Rau addressed actions and exceptions, res judicata, evidence and prescription — issues that are also matters of civil procedure, where the dialectic between substantive law and procedural law is most clearly manifested.

This brings us back to the subject of our congress and leads me to the concluding point of my remarks.

Thank you for your attention.

And see you in Buenos Aires, and then in Moscow.