Continuing the treaties relating to Intellectual Property, the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of
Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, or Budapest Treaty, is an international
treaty signed in Budapest, Hungary, on 28th
April 1977. It entered into force on 9th August 1980, and was later amended on 26th
September 1980. The treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO).
Odette Sansom Hallowes GC, MBE, Chevalier de la légion
d’honneur, was born 100 years ago today in Amiens, France on the 28th April 1912. She was an Allied heroine
of the Second World War. She was the daughter of the First World War hero,
Gaston Brailly, who was killed at Verdun in 1918. She was enrolled in Special
Forces of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and trained by Colonel Maurice
Buckmaster’s Special Operatios Executive to be sent into Nazi-occupied France
to work with the French Underground. She left her three daughters in a convent
school.
She made a landing near Cannes in 1942,
where she made contact with her supervisor, Peter Churchill. Using the code
name Lise, she brought him funds and acted as his courier. Churchill's
operation in France was betrayed by a double agent, and Odette and Churchill
were arrested on 16th April 1943 and imprisoned. Under torture by
the Gestapo at Fresnes prison in Paris, she stuck to her cover story that
Churchill was the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and that she was
Peter's wife. The hope was that in this way their treatment would be mitigated
She was condemned to death in June 1943,
although a time for execution was not specified, and sent to Ravensbrück
concentration camp. She survived the war and testified against the prison
guards at a 1946 war crimes trial. Camp commandant Fritz Suhren had brought her
with him when he surrendered to the Americans in the hope that her supposed
connections to Churchill might allow him to negotiate his way out of execution.
He was hanged in 1950.
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