I was fortunate to learn for the first time about Felipe towards the end of the year 2000. The Rome Statute had been adopted two years before, and PGA, the Coalition for an ICC (CICC) and other NGOs were conducting a global campaign to ensure the first 60 ratifications needed for its entry into force. Support for the Statute in Latin America was fueled by those who, like Felipe, survived the military dictatorship and were determined to promote a democratic and peaceful future of their countries and the world. To succeed in realizing the ICC project, we needed urgently to bridge those aspirations with political will and understanding about the role that the Rome Statute system could have played to prevent future crimes from happening. Felipe was a young, but very well-known activist for human rights in Uruguay, and he was about to complete his first term in the Chamber of Deputies, when he decided to join PGA during a seminar organized Amnesty International in Buenos Aires, Argentina. My colleague Juan Kim, who was accustomed to enlisting leaders and advocates from Latin America for PGA’s membership, described Felipe’s contribution to the proceedings of that Seminar with the most enthusiastic and laudatory words that I had ever heard from him. He was right.

Over the following months, Felipe became a leader of the PGA Campaign for the ratification and domestic implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), making interventions and statements that moved many of his colleagues-parliamentarians from Latin America and other regions of the world to pursue, without hesitations, joining the Rome Statute system. Felipe’s collaborative work in the region resulted in a wave of ratifications in 2001 that was consistent and continued, in a partnership effort that was embraced by other parliamentarians, Governments, NGOs and International Organizations.

At the very beginning of 2002, it was clear to our small PGA team that the path to 60 ratifications was about to be met. Members of Parliament who had played a key role in their countries’ ratification of the Rome Statute brainstormed with our team on what priorities and new strategies to advance International Law and Human Rights. Felipe’s voice was clear and articulate: He highlighted that the new Hague-based International Criminal Court was a judiciary without executive and legislative powers sustaining it, and that PGA should have created a de facto parliamentary body for the Rome Statute system. In parallel, a Dutch Member of Parliament, Gerrit Jan van Oven, formulated a complementary idea of a PGA-facilitated parliamentary constituency for the ICC through a parliamentary assembly. With PGA’s International Law and Human Rights Program Convenor Sen. Raynel Andreychuk (Canada) and the Chair of PGA Canada’s National Group Prof. Irwin Cotler, MP, we decided to focus the 2002 Annual Forum of the organization, to be held in Ottawa, on the first Consultative Assembly of Parliamentarians for the ICC & the Rule (CAP ICC). This umbrella title became the theme of the largest PGA annual gatherings with hundreds of parliamentarians around the world for the following two years at the margins of the first Assembly of State Parties in New York (2003) and in the New Zealand Parliament (2004).  Since Tokyo (2006), the CAP-ICC then became the biennial focus of PGA annual forum.

While this parliamentary constituency was under construction, PGA continued working country-by-country. In Latin America, for over two decades Felipe met, convened, explained, called, debated with peers creating a snowball of efforts of parliamentary diplomacy that secured continued support for the Rome Statute and the ICC in Uruguay, Argentina. Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, and Suriname.

At the end of 2004, Felipe left Parliament – and PGA – to become Deputy Minister for Education, Culture and Human Rights in the new Uruguayan Government. In this new capacity, one of his first projects was to implement the Rome Statute in the domestic legal order, so to incorporate into Uruguayan Law the principles of justice, legality and “never again”, which had marked all his academic and practitioner career before entering into politics.

Felipe appointed human rights’ lawyer Oscar Goldaracena as main drafter of a comprehensive piece of legislation designed to implement the obligation of Uruguay to cooperate with the ICC and the equally important obligation to comply with the principle of complementarity. The principle of complementarity translates in a diplomatically-accepted language the pre-existing obligation to investigate and prosecute international crimes and protect the rights of victims. As a result of Felipe’s methodic, inclusive, sharp and very hard work, in 2006 the Parliament of Uruguay unanimously approved Law 18.026, implementing the Rome Statute. It entered into force on 11 October 2006. Uruguay became the first country in Latin America to fulfill its obligations regarding implementation under the Rome Statute.

I invited Felipe to report on this great achievement at PGA’s 4^th CAP-ICC in November 2006 at the Parliament of Japan, in Tokyo. The event proved instrumental to including the ratification of the Rome Statute in the agenda of the first Cabinet of Prime Minister Abe and its unanimous adoption in the bicameral Japanese Parliament in 2007, thanks to the leadership of PGA members Sen. Tadashi Inuzuka and Rep. Mayumi Moriyama.

The paper presented by Felipe in the Diet of Japan marked a new phase in our global campaign against impunity: His analytical description of the Uruguayan Law inspired many Members of Parliament around the world to do the same in their own countries, and the global PGA network re-focused its efforts towards domestic reforms against impunity, with an increasing emphasis on victims’ rights, which were incorporated in a formidable manner in Articles 13 and 14 of Law No. 18.026 (“Cooperación con la Corte Penal Internacional en material de lucha contra el genocidio, los crímenes de guerra y de lesa humanidad”) of 13 September 2006. This law de facto extended to victims’ participation, protection and reparation the application of the principle of complementarity.

At the end of 2009, Felipe was re-elected as a Member of Parliament and reengaged with PGA. In May 2010, he addressed the 109 parliamentarians present at the 6^th CAP ICC in the Parliament of Uganda. The CAP-ICC took place just two days before the Kampala Review Conference, in which he participated in the first days of proceedings on behalf of PGA, and then joined Uruguay’s delegation. In Kampala, he left his political mark in the pivotal negotiations on the crime of aggression. In Montevideo, he worked tirelessly for 2 years building political consensus and ensuring that Uruguay would be the first country in Spanish-speaking Latin America to ratify (in September 2013) the Kampala Amendments of the Rome Statute. He then continued working with his peers in the region to expand the number of ratifications.

In 2011, Felipe became a member of PGA’s Executive Committee, exercising a leadership that changed the organization. On one hand, he offered Montevideo as regional hub to develop a reference law to implement the Rome Statute in domestic legal orders and support reform processes in key areas of interest for Latin American legislators. Starting in June 2012, the 10^th anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute, the Uruguayan Parliament hosted a series of events, co-organized by PGA, empowering dozens of Latin American Lawmakers to take the lead in their national system on the fight against impunity.[1] On the other hand, Felipe became a global leader of the PGA’s Rome Statute Campaign: He steered the Committee that organized the largest event ever put together by PGA, the 7^th CAP-ICC held in the Italian Parliament in Rome with over 300 parliamentarians in attendance and stakeholders from all regions of the world, on 10-11 December 2012.[2]

In the following years, Felipe continued to be an irreplaceable contributor to all the PGA campaigns, including those for Peace & Democracy/International Peace & Security, and for Gender, Equality & Inclusion. As a Board Member of the organization, he was able to provide balanced and focused advise, as well as sharp action, including the name of one of its three programmes.

When he left Parliament in 2015, he became a close ally of PGA in Latin America[3] and worldwide, and it was more than natural that our global membership supported his election to the Board of Directors of the Trust Fund for Victims of the ICC with great enthusiasm. Re-elected for a second term to the Board of the Trust Fund in December 2018, he was then appointed Chair, and started a very hard programme of work to which he was fully devoted. Relevant progress is reflected in his first annual statement to the ASP in December 2019[4]. Committed to victims’ rights, as he was, in December 2019 Felipe recalled to 123 States Parties that “without reparation there is no justice.” But also loyal to the principle of responsibility and transparency, he called on all States to contribute to the Trust Fund while making himself and the managing board accountable for ensuring effectiveness of the Fund.

Felipe’s life was marked by the tragic assassination in 1976 of his father, Zelmar Michelini, in the framework of Operation Condor, a criminal plan through which democracy and human rights were devastated across the entire Latin American region with a widespread and systematic plan of crimes against humanity.

In the summer of 2019, his eyes were set on Rome again, but this time on an equally important, but different matter: The historic judgement of the Appeals’ Chamber that judicially confirmed the existence of the transnational Plan Condor and condemned to life imprisonment several leaders and perpetrators from Uruguay and other countries for atrocities occurred in the years of the dictatorship. In the backstage, Felipe had played a central role in ensuring that the state of Uruguay effectively participated in the relevant trial proceedings through the appointment of an effective legal team as “parte civile”. In a radio interview, Felipe provided exemplary illustrations of the historic meaning of the Italian Judgement and denounced the “pacto mafioso” of Uruguayan perpetrators in impeding the establishment of individual criminal responsibility before Uruguayan Courts[5]. In February 2020, at the end of his mandate as coordinator of the Uruguayan Committee for Truth and Justice, Felipe denounced once again the criminal pact to cover up for the responsibilities of the gross human rights abuses of the dictatorship in interviews that he soberly released to various media[6].

His sudden loss, in the midst of many important projects, is depriving Uruguay and the world community of a uniquely powerful and persuasive voice in support of victims. But his example, and not his absence, should determine the outcome of his long-term life projects, and those of us who worked with him shall carry forward with determination.

Felipe Michelini was “a giant of his times”, but he did not need to act like it. His humble and calm approach to problems was, in and of itself, the best guidance provided to those who wanted to solve them. His ideas and actions were always informed by a sense of humanity, empathy and generosity that will never be forgotten. Our thoughts and permanent solidarity go to his wife Matilde, his son Nacho, his sister Cecilia, who leads the Fundacion Zelmar Michelini, and all his brothers and sisters, who have lost an extraordinary husband, father and brother. Felipe will be forever missed and he will remain always in our hearts.