Nikolaos Sokrates Politis

Nikolaos Sokrates Politis was a Greek jurist and diplomat, who played a prominent role in the international affairs of the early 20th century. He was a professor of law by training, and prior to the First World War, he taught law at the University of Paris and at the University of Aix. He was a supporter of Eleftherios Venizelos, the leader of the Liberal Party and the prime minister of Greece during the Balkan Wars and the First World War. He served alongside Venizelos as a delegate to the London Conference of 1912–1913, which resulted in the Treaty of London that ended the First Balkan War. He also served as his Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1916 to 1920 and again in 1922, during which time he represented Greece at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which recognized the independence of Armenia and Kurdistan and granted Greece the administration of Smyrna and Eastern Thrace. He also negotiated the Treaty of Ankara of 1921, which established a modus vivendi between Greece and Turkey during the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922. He resigned from his post after the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor and the overthrow of Venizelos by a military coup in 1922. He then served as Greece's representative to the League of Nations, where he was a champion of disarmament and the peaceful settlement of disputes. He wrote the report on the Geneva Protocol of 1924, which proposed the outlawing of war and the arbitration of international conflicts. He also signed the Politis–Kalfov Protocol of 1925, which settled the border dispute between Greece and Bulgaria that had led to the Second Balkan War of 1913. He was also the vice president of the Disarmament Conference of 1932–1934, where he framed the official League definition of aggression and participated with Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov in formulating the Convention on the Definition of Aggression of 1933, which defined the criteria for determining an act of aggression and the collective responsibility of the League members to resist it. He was also the president of the Institute of International Law from 1937 to 1942 and was largely responsible for the founding of the Academy of International Law at The Hague, which is a prestigious institution for the study and teaching of public and private international law. He also served as a member of the International Olympic Committee from 1930 to 1933. In 1935, he served as Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris and in that capacity supported the restoration of the Greek monarchy, which had been abolished by the Second Hellenic Republic in 1924. He died in Cannes in 1942.