The Association mourns the passing of Professor Reynald Ottenhof, a friend to many active members and a figure of exceptional importance in the life of the Association for nearly half a century. Appointed Deputy Secretary General and Treasurer in 1974, Professor Ottenhof went on, over successive terms until 2009, to serve first as Secretary General and later as Scientific Vice-President of the Association. These responsibilities he combined with the directorship of the Revue Internationale de Droit Pénal and other AIDP publications, as well as with membership of the Board of Directors of the Syracuse Institute from 1976 onward. In his later years, he was Honorary Vice-President of the AIDP. He was also an active member of the International Society of Criminology and of the International Society for Social Defence, of which he served as Vice-President.

It was in the context of AIDP activities that Reynald became one of the targets of a terrorist attack that profoundly marked his life: the shooting of patrons at La Felouque, the restaurant of the Semiramis Intercontinental Hotel in Cairo, on 26 October 1993, during a conference organised by the Egyptian National Group of the Association. His two table companions—Fernand Boulan, Dean of the Faculty of Law at Aix-en-Provence and Editor-in-Chief of the Revue at the time, and the Italian magistrate Luigi Daga—died as a result of the attack. Reynald miraculously escaped unharmed.

A dedicated academic, Professor Ottenhof was Professor Emeritus at the University of Nantes, the city where he was born in 1939 and where he began his university career in 1961. He obtained his doctorate in 1968 in Rennes—where he had completed his law studies—with a major doctoral thesis on criminal law and the formation of civil contracts, supervised by Professor Pierre Bouzat. In 1972, he was appointed professor at the University of Pau and the Pays de l’Adour, where he taught for more than twenty years until 1994, when he joined the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Nantes. He was awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of the Basque Country.

His principal scientific contributions focused on crime prevention, juvenile delinquency, and other central issues of criminal policy and international criminal law—fields to which, as a passionate “amateur,” he also added the subject of “bullfighting in the judicial arena.” A deep commitment to the respect and protection of the human rights of all those affected by criminal intervention, both offenders and victims, ran as a constant thread through his work. This commitment informed numerous research projects covering a broad range of French and international criminal and criminological issues, and found concrete expression in his active participation in the drafting of the United Nations Convention against Torture, as well as in the Intergovernmental Conference that led to the creation of the International Criminal Court.