Thomas Buergenthal helped make governments answer for the disappeared

Person: Thomas Buergenthal
Lived: 1934–2023
Field: International human rights law
From: American

The story

Thomas Buergenthal knew what it meant for a state to turn on its own people. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1934 to Jewish parents who had fled Nazi Germany, he survived the Kielce ghetto, Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen as a child, while his father was murdered in the camps. After emigrating to the United States and earning law degrees at New York University and Harvard, he devoted his career to international human rights law.

In 1979 he was elected to the newly created Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San José, Costa Rica, the court that enforces the American Convention on Human Rights. He served until 1991 and was its president from 1985 to 1987. At the time, military governments and armed conflicts across Latin America were making political opponents, students and union members vanish. Families were left without a body, a trial or an answer, and governments simply denied knowing anything.

One of those who vanished was Angel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez, a student activist at the national university of Honduras. On September 12, 1981, armed men forced him into a car without license plates in Tegucigalpa, and he was never seen again. The Honduran government denied any knowledge of his fate. His case reached the Inter-American Court, where Buergenthal sat among the seven judges who decided it in July 1988.

The court found Honduras responsible for his disappearance. Crucially, it reasoned that a state violates the American Convention not only when its agents commit abuses but also when it fails to take reasonable steps to prevent them, to investigate them seriously and to punish those responsible. It ordered Honduras to compensate his family, and Honduras paid in full; the case was formally closed in 1996.

Velásquez Rodríguez became one of the most cited decisions in international human rights law. Its idea that governments have a positive duty to investigate and remedy grave abuses has been taken up by the European Court of Human Rights and by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. Buergenthal went on to teach these principles in his books and classes for decades, and to apply them as a UN truth commissioner, a member of the UN Human Rights Committee and a judge of the International Court of Justice.

Why it matters

Families of the disappeared across Latin America and beyond can still demand that governments search, investigate and compensate, because of the principle this court established.

About Thomas Buergenthal

Child survivor of Auschwitz who became a founding judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a UN truth commissioner for El Salvador and a judge of the International Court of Justice.

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Thomas Buergenthal

1934–2023 · International human rights law

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