- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
Aryeh Neier has long argued that people who commit mass atrocities must face consequences. If an ordinary murderer kills one person, he has asked, the law does not let him walk the streets; how then can someone responsible for a hundred or a thousand murders go free? Without consequences, he says, there is no way to protect people against such crimes.
He saw the modern movement for accountability take shape in Latin America. After Argentina's defeat in the Falklands war in 1982, the military regime declared an amnesty for itself before handing over power. The newly elected president rejected it, set up a commission to investigate the disappearances, which documented 8,960 cases, and began prosecuting the leaders responsible. Neier describes this as the origin of truth commissions, which have since been created in more than 40 countries. He distinguishes sharply between a peace settlement and the self-amnesty of a regime forgiving its own crimes, which he says cannot be tolerated.
Putting his view into practice, Neier was closely involved in creating the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and in creating the International Criminal Court. He spent much time in Bosnia during the war there and worked to support prosecutions. He has pointed out that negotiators feared the Yugoslavia tribunal would block a peace deal, but that in fact it made the Dayton settlement easier to reach.
As president of the Open Society Foundations he also supported organisations working for accountability, among them the International Center for Transitional Justice and the US-based Center for Justice and Accountability. The latter brings civil suits in American courts against people who committed abuses abroad and later moved to the United States.
Such cases build on a line of litigation that began when Joelle Filártiga, a Paraguayan woman living in New York, recognised on a Brooklyn street the man who had tortured her brother to death. A court ruled that a law from the 1790s, the Alien Tort Claims Act, allowed suits for violations of international law committed abroad. Later suits under the act included one by victims of torture under Ferdinand Marcos, which led to damages being distributed to survivors in the Philippines.
Why it matters
The courts and organisations Neier championed made it far harder for those responsible for torture, war crimes and genocide to escape justice.
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 co-founded Human Rights WatchAryeh Neier, who fled Nazi Germany as a two-year-old in 1939, led the ACLU, co-founded Human Rights Watch in 1978 and headed the Open Society Foundations.
- 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
- Biographical interview with Aryeh Neier Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte
- Aryeh Neier Wikipedia
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.