Malcolm Evans passed away at the age of 54 on 23 February 1997 after a long struggle against cancer, borne always with great courage and dignity. He had been 24 years with UNIDROIT, of which the final thirteen as its Secretary General.
Born of Welsh parents in Poole, Dorset in the United Kingdom on 8 May 1942, Malcolm Evans read law at Balliol College, Oxford, subsequently taking a Bachelorship in Civil Law. After three years teaching law at the University of Exeter, where his innate warmth and thoughtfulness were already earning him, with his students, that popularity which was never to desert him for the remainder of his life, his interest in the developing European institutions, reinforced by his gift for languages, led him, accompanied by Carla, his young Italian bride, to Strasbourg where, from 1968 to 1973, after a short spell in the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights, he worked in the Central Division of the Directorate of Legal Affairs of the Council of Europe. As personal assistant to Mr Golsong, he worked as part of a team of talented young lawyers, including Mr Francis Jacobs, who was to go on to become Advocate-General at the Court of Justice of the European Communities, Mr Hans-Christian Krüger, who became Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, and the future Professor Hans-Jürgen Bartsch, all of whom remained lifelong friends.
Already, though, his thoughts were moving in the direction of Italy, undoubtedly spurred on in part by his family connections but also by a growing interest in the Italian legal system, testified by the seminal article on "The Italian Constitutional Court" which he wrote for the International and Comparative Law Quarterly Review. His move to UNIDROIT in April 1973 therefore made sense in both a professional and a personal context. After three years he became Deputy Secretary General. His activity and dedication to duty were prodigious, as was his ability to deal with a varied range of legal subjects. After spearheading the Institute's efforts to follow up the 1970 International Convention on the Travel Contract, his attentions, abetted by the memory of his predecessor Mr André Hennebicq, who had for many years been the mainstay of European efforts to unify the law of transport by road and inland navigation, turned to transport law. This became in many ways his chosen field. After working on a range of UNIDROIT initiatives, he began what he would probably consider his two major projects, one of which resulted in the Convention on Civil Liability for Damage caused during Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road, Rail and Inland Navigation Vessels (C.R.T.D.), adopted in Geneva in 1989 under the auspices of the Economic Commission for Europe of the United Nations, and the other the United Nations Convention on the Liability of Operators of Transport Terminals in International Trade, adopted in Vienna in 1991.
His term of office as Deputy Secretary General was, however, particularly marked by the conclusion of the 1983 Convention on Agency in the International Sale of Goods, a project on which the Institute had been working for many years. In 1984, his flair and capacity for hard work earned him appointment as Secretary General. Under his leadership the Institute enjoyed a veritable renaissance, promoting a series of successful international Conventions, the 1988 Ottawa Conventions on International Financial Leasing and International Factoring and the 1995 Rome Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects. He was sufficiently pragmatic, and perhaps visionary, to see the utility of the Institute sponsoring, in 1994, a totally new form of unification, the Principles of International Commercial Contracts, which have gone on to enjoy major success. One of his last major achievements was the reorganisation of the Uniform Law Review, in which, as its Editor in Chief, he played a leading part.
Malcolm Evans' eminence as an international lawyer was paralleled by his outstanding skills as an administrator. He built up around him a team of young lawyers of different nationalities, making it his business to fire them with his own high professional standards and his conception of the role of an intergovernmental Organisation on the eve of the XXIst century. His personal qualities, in particular his warmth, his loyalty, his gentle humour and his unwavering concern for others, endeared him to all those who had the honour to know and work with him. Yet absorbing though his professional life was, his passions nevertheless remained many and varied, ranging from music and poetry to the rugby that was perhaps the most eloquent expression of his Welsh roots. His appetite for new ideas allied to his natural reflectiveness made him the perfect man to steer the UNIDROIT helm in times of momentous change.
He devoted himself body and soul to the Institute he loved, and with which his name will remain forever associated. Under his leadership, UNIDROIT flourished, witness its growing membership and the ever-widening circle of jurists actively involved in its work. His gift for finding the right response to the many methodological challenges facing the unification of law was an asset of incalculable value to the Institute in these tumultuous closing years of the millennium.