When EU leaders resume their talks this morning amid the faded grandeur of a seafront casino in Biarritz, they will consider the text of a new Charter of Fundamental Rights for EU citizens. The leaders are expected to approve the text but they will put off a decision about whether the charter should be a legally binding document or a political declaration with no legal force.
The fact that the leaders have a text to discuss at all owes much to the quiet determination of Dr Roman Herzog, the former German president who chaired the convention charged with drawing up the charter.
"I'm going to explode", Dr Herzog is reported to have told friends earlier this year as the convention, made up of 62 representatives from the European Parliament and national governments, got bogged down in yet another wrangle over what should be included in the charter. But he kept his cool and through more than 30 sittings of the convention, cajoled the unwieldy drafting committee into finding common ground.
Born in the Bavarian town of Landshut in 1934, Dr Herzog was an unfamiliar figure to most of his fellow citizens when he became Germany's president in 1994. As his party's second choice for the post, he aroused little excitement and few expectations. But by the time he stepped down five years later, this bluff constitutional lawyer had become one of his country's most popular and respected figures and had stamped his easy-going personality on Germany's highest office.
Dr Herzog joined the Christian Democrats in 1970 and served as interior minister in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg in the early 1980s. He became a hate-figure for many on the left when he equipped riot police with plastic bullets and introduced a "demonstration charge" that required organisers of unlicensed protests to pay for any police operation judged necessary.
When Dr Helmut Kohl became chancellor in 1983, he appointed Dr Herzog to the Constitutional Court, where he remained for 11 years, becoming president of the court in 1987, a post he held until he succeeded Dr Richard von Weizsacker as Germany's president seven years later.
Dr Herzog's popularity as president owed much to his wife Christiane, a naturally reserved woman who devoted most of her spare time to a charity for sick children.
A few weeks before she died of cancer in June, Dr Herzog cancelled all his engagements to spend time with her in their unassuming house in Dachau, near Munich.
Dr Herzog has long maintained that Germany's future lies in a politically united Europe, predicting that "Brussels will be more important than Berlin" for the next generation of Germans. But he has been sceptical about the need for a European constitution: "I fear that a constitutional project could become a mountain that gives birth either to a mouse or a Eurocratic monster."
The text of the Draft Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union is available now from the home page of The Irish Times web site at www.ireland.com