Flavia Lattanzi

Flavia Lattanzi was born in Addis Ababa, then part of Italian East Africa, on 4 October 1940, the daughter of Elza Dolezalova and Pietro Sante Lattanzi. During the Second World War she and her mother were interned as soon as she was born in a British camp in Ethiopia, while her father was held in a prisoner of war camp in Uganda. She was the only child under the age of three to survive the camp, and she was repatriated in 1943.

From 1943 to 1948 she lived in Bohemia, where her mother's family came from, and went to school in the village of Svor in the Ceska Lipa district. At the end of 1948 the family moved to the family home at Ripa, in Fagnano Alto in the Abruzzo, where she attended primary school. She spoke Italian, Russian, Czech and English fluently.

She graduated in political science from Sapienza University of Rome with a thesis on Soviet theories of international law, supervised by Roberto Ago, who later sat on the International Court of Justice.

Lattanzi began her academic career in the second half of the 1960s as a volunteer assistant at Sapienza's institute of international law, working on the journal La Comunita internazionale. She then taught at the faculty of political science in Teramo, part of the D'Annunzio University of Chieti, before returning to Sapienza as a permanent assistant. At Sapienza she also worked with Gaetano Arangio-Ruiz, with whom she kept a long scholarly association.

In 1985 she became associate professor of international law at the University of Pisa, and she also taught at LUISS in Rome. In 1990 she moved to the University of Sassari, and in 1996 she became a full professor in the law faculty at Teramo, where she directed the department of public law, founded a doctorate in international organisation and ran an international master's programme on cooperation against transnational crime. In the early 2000s she moved to Roma Tre, where she taught until 2012, and she later taught at LUISS Guido Carli. She also lectured at international schools of criminal law in Arusha and Gaborone.

Her early research dealt with private international law and the recognition of foreign judgments. Her 1983 book on the guarantee of human rights in general international law was followed by studies of international commercial arbitration, a 1997 book on humanitarian assistance and humanitarian intervention, and many works on international criminal jurisdiction, including commentaries on the statute of the International Criminal Court and two volumes of Essays on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court edited with William Schabas.

She was a legal adviser to the Italian delegation at the 1998 Rome diplomatic conference that adopted the statute of the International Criminal Court, and to the court's preparatory commission. From 2001 she chaired a Ministry of Justice commission on the ratification and implementation of international instruments in criminal procedure, and from 2001 to 2016 she was a member of the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission.

In October 2003 she was appointed an ad litem judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, sitting on the Government I trial and the Rutaganira, Mpambara and Muvunyi cases until 2006. On 2 July 2007 she was sworn in as an ad litem judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Her first case was the trial of Rasim Delic. She was a reserve judge in the trial of Radovan Karadzic and a member of the trial chamber in the case of Vojislav Seselj, and her mandate ended on 31 March 2016.

When the chamber acquitted Seselj on all counts on 31 March 2016, Lattanzi dissented from eight of the nine acquittals. She criticised the majority for ignoring the intimidation of witnesses and for reasoning that rarely engaged with the applicable law, and found that a widespread and systematic attack on non-Serb civilians had taken place in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Vojvodina. On 11 April 2018 the appeals chamber of the residual mechanism partly reversed the acquittal and convicted Seselj of crimes against humanity, sentencing him to ten years.

In 2018 she appeared as amicus curiae before the International Criminal Court in Jordan's appeal over its failure to arrest Omar al-Bashir. Her later scholarship examined the Armenian massacres of 1915 and 1916, which she concluded met the legal definition of genocide, the relationship between ethnic cleansing and genocide, and the statehood of Palestine. She worked with the campaign group No Peace Without Justice for many years in support of the International Criminal Court.

Lattanzi was first married to Walter Monier, a former partisan, journalist and translator. Her second marriage, in a civil ceremony, was to the jurist Paolo Benvenuti. She had three children.

She kept close ties with the Abruzzo village of Fagnano Alto where she grew up, and several of the edited volumes she produced were published there. She chaired the scientific committee of the Arangio-Ruiz Foundation for International Law.

Flavia Lattanzi died on 15 August 2026, aged 85. Her death was announced by the Arangio-Ruiz Foundation for International Law, as reported by the Adnkronos news agency, and was reported in the Abruzzo press on 18 August 2026. The cause of death was not made public.

The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals published a tribute describing her as a distinguished international law expert who had advised Italy during the negotiations that established the International Criminal Court, and said she was remembered for her contributions to international criminal law and her dedication to holding perpetrators of atrocities accountable.

Lattanzi belonged to the generation of Italian international lawyers who helped build the modern system of international criminal justice, both as scholars and as practitioners. Her writing on complementarity between the International Criminal Court and national legal systems, and on adapting domestic law to the Rome Statute, was widely cited, and her dissent in the Seselj case is remembered as one of the sharpest written at the Yugoslavia tribunal. The partial reversal of that acquittal on appeal was seen by many as a vindication of her reasoning.