Life of Ivo Lapenna, 05.11.1909 - 15.12.1987

On the tenth of April 1941 Zagreb was occupied by Nazi and Ustasha forces. Because of his democratic progressive ideas and activities, including his work for Esperanto, Dr. Lapenna's name was on the list of those to be arrested and deported. He immediately went underground, and at the end of July 1941, with the help of a forged passport, succeeded in escaping to Split, which at the time was under Italian-fascist occupation. He joined the movement for national liberation and in 1943 enrolled in Tito's Army of National Liberation. He performed various duties in the territories liberated by the partisans in Bosnia and nothern Dalmatia and on the islands of Brac, Hvar, and Vis, in particular as a correspondent for Slobodna Dalmacija (Free Dalmatia). At the beginning of 1944 he was sent to Bari, Italy, as editor first of Dnevne Vijesti (Daily News), published by the Yugoslav Military Mission in Bari, and then, somewhat later, of Glasnik Ujedinjenih Nacija (United Nations Herald), which was dropped in tens of millions of copies over occupied Yugoslavia, three times a week, by the allied air forces. From April 1944 to the end of the war in May 1945 he was editor-in-chief of Slobodna Dalmacija (Free Dalmatia), which grew from a weekly published from a cave on the island of Vis into a daily in liberated Split. In November 1943 he succeeded in organizing a small conference of fifteen Esperantists in the town of Livno, Bosnia, surrounded by enemy forces and the sound of gunfire. In 1945 he was demobilized and became a reserve officer in the Yugoslav Army with the rank of Major.

After the war his first posts were Head of the Domestic Press Department of the Croatian People's Republic and then Editor of Narodne Novine, the Official Gazette of the Croatian P.R. Following this he was appointed Lecturer (Docent), then Professor of International Law and International Relations in the Faculty of Law of Zagreb University; at the same time he was Lecturer in the History of Diplomatic Relations and the History of Political Doctrine; in parallel with this he was Honorary Lecturer in International Relations in the Faculty of Economics. He acted as Expert on International Law for the Yugoslav delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946, and as counsel for Albania in its lawsuit against Britain at the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 1947-48, the case arising from the incidents in the Corfu Channel. In 1948 he became a Corresponding Member of the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb. He further participated in the editing and compilation of Zbornik Pravnog Fakulteta u Zagrebu (Zagreb Law Faculty Collection) and was a member of the editorial committee of the leading Yugoslav law journal, Arhiv za Pravne i Drustvene Nauke (Archive for Law and the Social Sciences), published in Belgrade. In the period 1946-49 he attended various national and international law conferences in Belgrade, Paris, Brussels, and at the Academy of International Law at the Haque.

From the end of 1949 Ivo Lapenna resided outside Yugoslavia. To begin with he lived in Paris, then from mid-1951 in London, where he subsequently became a British citizen. In Paris he held the post of research associate with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research), for which he wrote his Conceptions Soviétiques de Droit International Public (Soviet Concepts of International Public Law). In London he was successively Research Fellow (from 1956), Lecturer, Reader (Docent), and then Professor of Comparative Soviet and East European Law at the world-renowned London School of Economics and Political Science, part of the University of London. In this way he achieved his second professorial chair. After his retirement in October 1977 the University of London conferred upon him the title of Professor Emeritus of Comparative Soviet and East European Law; but at the request of the university authorities he continued his regular work in the university. In 1972 he had received an honorary doctorate in International Relations from the University of Fort Lauderdale. He was a member of various legal institutes and societies, including in particular the Institute of World Affairs in London.

In addition to his teaching an legal work at the University of London, Prof. Lapenna gave invited lectures at numerous other universities and legal institutions, including those of Belgrade, Uppsala, Stockholm, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Venice, Paris, Strasbourg, New York, Washington, Harvard, Yale, Sydney, and Canberra.

Ivo Lapenna died on 15 December 1987 in Copenhagen and is buried there.

Birthe & Ivo Lapenna

Work for the Esperanto-Movement

Principal stages in the building of the modern international Esperanto movement:

Esperanto Teaching:

Main works in Esperanto:

This activity on behalf of Esperanto - spread over scholarly documentation, publicity, teaching, and the rendition of practical services in the widest sence of the word - demanded a minimum of 65,000 effective working hours over the years 1929- 1984.

Dum la kampanjoj lige kun la Peticio al UN/Unesko

Other

Principal legal works in national languages:

Knowledge of languages:

Sports: