Olivier Jacot-Guillarmod was a prominent international lawyer, a vice-director for internal affairs of the Federal Office of Justice, a law professor in Neuchâtel and a representative of Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Council of Europe and a Justice on the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
Jacot-Guillarmod was born on the 15th April 1950 in La-Chaux-de-Fonds and died on the 29th September 2001 in Lausanne. He went to school and to the gymnasium in La-Chaux-de-Fonds before going on to study law in Neuchâtel. In 1974 he was admitted to the bar; thereafter he visited several countries, writing his doctoral thesis at the Collège d’Europe in Bruges on the relationship between the common market and international public law. In 1978 he became a vice-director of the Federal Office of Justice. He was a lecturer in law and from 1991 was an associate professor of European law, at the University of Neuchâtel. From 1981 to 1995 he was the representative of Switzerland to the European Court of Human Rights and to the Council of Europe. From 1996 to 2001 he was an elected Justice to the Swiss Federal Tribunal.
His major works include : Olivier Jacot-Guillarmod (ed.), La fusion de la Commission et de la Cour européennes des droits de l’homme, Engel, 1987 ; Annuaire de la Convention européenne des droits de l’homme, 1995, vol.38-A, p. 172 ; Louis-Edmond Pettiti, Emmanuel Decaux et Pierre-Henri Imbert, La Convention européenne des droits de l’homme, Economica, 2ème éd., 1999, p. 41 ; SFDI, Droit international et droit communautaire, perspectives actuelles, Pedone, 1999 ; Dossiers de droit européen, n° 8, 2001.