Cheng Tien-hsi

Cheng at the Permanent International Court of Justice (1945)

Cheng Tien-hsi ( Chinese  郑天锡 , Pinyin Zhèng Tiānxī , W.-G. Cheng Tien-hsi , born  July 10, 1884 in Mawei , Fuzhou , Chinese Empire , †  January 31, 1970 in Hampstead , London , United Kingdom ) was a Chinese lawyer , politician and diplomat . He served as Deputy Minister of Justice of the Republic of China from 1932 to 1934 and as a judge at the Permanent International Court of Justice from 1936 to 1946 .

Life

Cheng Tien-hsi was born in Fuzhou in 1884 and graduated with an LL.B. in 1912 after studying law at the University of Cambridge. , four years later he received his PhD from the University of London . He was the first Chinese to receive a doctorate from an English university. After he was admitted to the bar in 1913, he practiced as a lawyer in London until 1916 . In 1917 he returned to China, where he also worked as a lawyer for a short time before moving to the Ministry of Justice. From 1920 to 1925 he served as a judge at the Supreme Court and as a member of the commission responsible for the codification of the law of the Chinese Republic.

In addition, he worked as a lecturer in English law at Beijing University in the 1920s and as a lawyer in Shanghai from 1927 to 1932 . From 1932 to 1934 he was deputy and temporarily acting Minister of Justice, and then until 1936 legal advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Justice. In October 1936 he was elected judge at the Permanent International Court of Justice in The Hague . He succeeded his compatriot and friend Wang Ch'ung-hui , who had resigned for personal reasons in January of the same year, and remained in office until the court was dissolved after the end of the Second World War . The court's activities were discontinued in 1942 due to the war.

After the war, Cheng Tien-hsi served as ambassador to Great Britain from 1946 to 1950. He died in London in 1970. The lawyer Bin Cheng (1921-2019) was one of his sons .

literature

• Biographical Notes concerning Members of the Court. Mr. Cheng Tien-Hsi, Member of the Court. In: Thirteenth Annual Report of the Permanent Court of International Justice. AW Sijthoff's Publishing, Leiden 1937, pp. 23/24
• Warren F. Kuehl: Cheng Tien-hsi. In: Warren F. Kuehl (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists. Greenwood Press, Westport 1983, ISBN 0-313-22129-4 , pp. 151/152

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chia-Jui Cheng: Biography: Bin Cheng . In: Chia-Jui Cheng (Ed.): Studies in International Air Law: Selected Works of Bin Cheng . Brill Nijhoff, Leiden 2018, ISBN 978-90-04-34515-7 , pp. LVIII .

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Cheng is the family name here, Tsien-hsi is the first name.