Turkel C'tee's Prof. Shabtai Rosen, 93, dies in J'lem home

Accomplished professor of international law and recipient of Israel Prize for jurisprudence to be laid to rest in Jerusalem.

By YAAKOV LAPPIN
Turkel Committee 311 (photo credit: GPO)
Turkel Committee 311
(photo credit: GPO)
A member of the Turkel Commission that is investigating the navy’s interception of the Gaza flotilla on May 31 died of of heart failure in his Jerusalem home on Tuesday night.
Prof. Shabtai Rosenne, 93, was buried in the capital on Wednesday.
Rosenne won the Israel Prize for Jurisprudence in 1960 and the 2004 Hague Prize for International Law. He served as the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, and held a number of senior diplomatic posts, including as deputy ambassador to the UN from 1967 to 1971, and as ambassador to the UN from 1971 to 1974. In 1972, a letter bomb was sent to him, which was defused.
The chairman of the Turkel Commission, former Supreme Court justice Jacob Turkel, described Rosenne’s death as “a great loss to his family, to the people of Israel, to the international law community and to the commission.”
Rosenne was born in 1917 in London. He served in the Royal Air Force between 1940 and 1946. He then worked for the Jewish Agency’s diplomatic section in London and Jerusalem for two years.
Before the declaration of the state, Rosenne was appointed to the Legal Secretariat of the Situation Committee, which helped create Israel’s administrative apparatus.
As the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser from 1948 to 1967, he was a member of the delegation that negotiated the 1949 Armistice Agreements.
After retiring from the diplomatic corps, Rosenne was a professor at Bar-Ilan University, and a visiting professor at Cambridge University.
The Prime Minister’s Office released a statement praising the life and career of Rosenne and expressing “deep sorrow” at his death.

Jerusalem Post staff contributed to this report.