Giorgio Sacerdoti, an Emeritus Professor of International Law, has been recently celebrated at Bocconi in occasion of his 80th birthday.

Among the first Italian jurists to sense how important European Law would become , Sacerdoti took on an international profile from the very beginning, not only in his studies, starting with a Master's degree in comparative law at Columbia University, immediately after his Italian degree in 1967. In parallel with his academic commitment, he was selected to hold important positions within international organizations, both as an Italian expert and representing the European Union.

 

Sacerdoti was born into a Jewish family in 1943 amid extreme danger, and only by taking shelter in Switzerland did his parents and he, born only a few months before, escape Nazi-Fascist persecution. When in the mid-1980s Italy decided to replace the 1929 Concordat, abolishing the state religion and thus putting all faiths on an equal footing, Sacerdoti was the chairman of the Legal Commission that negotiated, along with the government for the Union of Jewish Communities, the accord governing the status of Judaism in Italy under Article 8 of the Constitution. He is currently Head of the Contemporary Jewish Documentation Center in Milan, which is based at the Central Station where the Shoah Memorial is located, better known as Binario21