Two Lectures in Honor of the Late SASA Foreign Member, Thomas Fleiner

Two lectures honouring Professor Thomas Fleiner, an SASA foreign member, organized by the SASA Board for the Study of National Minorities and Human Rights, will be delivered on Tuesday, 15 October, at the SASA Hall 2, at noon.

The first lecture, titled “Modern State Concept in Thomas Fleiner’s Work,” will be presented by Dr. Dragoljub Popović, a former judge at the European Court of Human Rights. Following that, Professor Tanasije Marinković from the Faculty of Law at the University of Belgrade will deliver a lecture on “Thomas Fleiner’s Philosophy of Human Rights.”

Thomas Fleiner, a great jurist, humanist, and friend of Serbia, passed away on 24 November 2023. He was born in Zurich in 1938. After graduating from the University of Zurich, he received his MA from Yale University and, in accordance with Swiss university tradition, habilitated in constitutional, administrative, and international law from the University of Freiburg.

For three decades, starting in 1971, he was a professor of public law at the University of Freiburg, while in 1984 he helmed the Institute of Federalism at the University. In the mid-1990s, he became a president of the International Association for Constitutional Law which he co-founded during a conference in Belgrade in 1981. As a visiting professor, he gave lectures across the globe – in the USA, Japan, China, many European countries, Africa and South America. He is the author and editor of numerous expert books, among which the capital work Allgemeine Staatslehre (in the English edition Constitutional Democracy in a Multicultural and Globalized World), which he co-authored with his wife Lidia Basta-Fleiner, stands out.

He was a great friend of Serbia and Serbian people, and he managed to learn the Serbian language so he could read Latin alphabet newspapers. As a top legal expert, the Serbian Government engaged him as an advisor and a member of our delegation in international community contacts during the initial negotiations on Kosovo problem solutions in the first decade of the 21st century. He was pronounced an honorary citizen of Yugoslavia in 2002. On several occasions, he spent time at Serbian universities teaching courses in the fields he was engaged in, most often at the Faculty of Political Sciences and the Faculty of Law of the University of Belgrade. In November 2009. Professor Fleiner was inducted as a foreign member of SASA.