- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
Aryeh Neier was born in Berlin on 22 April 1937 to a German Jewish family, the son of a teacher. In 1939, when he was two, the family fled to England. He spent his first year there in a hostel for refugee children before being reunited with his parents and sister in London, where they lived through the bombing raids, and the family was later evacuated to the shoe-making town of Kettering. After the war they moved to New York.
Neier was drawn to questions of rights early. At Stuyvesant High School in the McCarthy years he ran the History Club and invited Raphael Lemkin, the author of the Genocide Convention, to speak. At Cornell University, which he attended on a state scholarship, he was moved by the Montgomery bus boycott and the Hungarian revolution and organised a talk to challenge campus bans on Communist speakers. Afterwards he led the League for Industrial Democracy and renamed its student wing Students for a Democratic Society.
He joined the American Civil Liberties Union in 1963, at 26. He directed the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1964 to 1970 and was the ACLU's national executive director from 1970 to 1978, spending 15 years at the organisation in all. Under him its membership grew from 140,000 to 200,000, and it took up the rights of prisoners and psychiatric patients and represented many thousands of opponents of the Vietnam War.
In 1978 a friend asked him to help create Helsinki Watch, which the publisher Robert L. Bernstein established to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords. Neier led it as executive director for 12 years as it added Americas Watch and other committees, which together became Human Rights Watch in 1988. He investigated abuses around the world and took part in creating the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
From 1993 to 2012 he was the founding president of the Open Society Institute, later the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropy created by George Soros, which he had earlier brought in as a donor to Human Rights Watch. He has written seven books, contributed widely to The New York Review of Books, and taught at New York University, Georgetown and Sciences Po.
Why it matters
Human Rights Watch, which Neier helped build, now documents abuses in dozens of countries, and its reports help hold governments to account.
About Aryeh Neier
Child refugee from Nazi Berlin who led the ACLU, co-founded Human Rights Watch and for two decades ran George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
More about Aryeh Neier
- Aryeh Neier helped build the machinery of accountabilityAryeh Neier was involved in creating both the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal and the International Criminal Court, and supported groups that pursue justice for victims.
- Aryeh Neier set up ACLU branches in Texas and OklahomaAryeh Neier's first ACLU job, in 1963, was strengthening its state branches; he organized new affiliates in Texas and Oklahoma, where the ACLU had none.
- Aryeh Neier grew the ACLU and defended the overlookedAs national director of the ACLU from 1970 to 1978, Aryeh Neier helped grow membership from 140,000 to 200,000 and led work on the rights of prisoners and psychiatric patients.
- Helsinki Watch began as a fight to free Soviet monitorsAryeh Neier co-founded Helsinki Watch in 1978 to press for the release of the Moscow Helsinki Group, whose members had been jailed for monitoring Soviet human rights promises.
- Aryeh Neier applied the laws of war to every sideUnder Aryeh Neier, Human Rights Watch began monitoring violations of the laws of armed conflict, holding governments and guerrillas alike to the Geneva Conventions.
- Aryeh Neier's NYCLU took up police and asylum abusesAs director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in the 1960s, Aryeh Neier pressed for civilian review of police and began defending people confined in mental institutions.
- Aryeh Neier's team helped uncover the Vukovar massacreA Human Rights Watch researcher working for Aryeh Neier first identified the 1991 killing of more than 200 men taken from Vukovar's hospital, later confirmed by exhumation.
- Aryeh Neier's foundation backed Kofi Annan's Kenya peaceDuring Kofi Annan's mediation after Kenya's disputed 2007 election, the Open Society Foundations led by Aryeh Neier provided a monitoring staff to track the peace agreement.
Sources
- Aryeh Neier Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University
- Aryeh Neier Wikipedia
- Biographical interview with Aryeh Neier Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.