- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
Aryeh Neier came to civil liberties work by way of student politics. At Cornell he had been inspired by the socialist leader Norman Thomas, a founder of the ACLU whom Neier admired above all as a defender of civil liberties and remembered as the best public speaker he ever heard. After college he went to work for the League for Industrial Democracy, the organisation associated with the socialist leader Norman Thomas, and soon became its director even though he was the youngest person on the staff. In 1960 he met Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, at a human rights meeting in Venezuela.
Three years later the ACLU had a job opening. Neier applied and was hired in 1963, at the age of 26. His first assignment was to strengthen its state affiliates, the branches that take up civil liberties cases in their own states: to increase their membership and funding and expand their programmes. He worked especially with the affiliates in Michigan and Pennsylvania and travelled widely across the country.
In some states the ACLU had no affiliate at all, and there he created them. Neier organised new ACLU branches in Texas and Oklahoma, giving people there a local organisation able to defend constitutional rights.
After about a year and a half in that post, the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who was retiring at 68, asked that Neier, more than 40 years his junior, succeed him, and arranged the appointment. Neier led the New York affiliate for the rest of the 1960s, taking on police abuse, the rights of psychiatric patients and prisoners' rights, and in 1970 he became national executive director of the ACLU.
The organisation kept growing. Under his national leadership the ACLU's membership rose from 140,000 to 200,000, and he spent 15 years there in all before leaving in 1978 to help found Helsinki Watch, later Human Rights Watch.
Why it matters
The branches Neier helped found extended civil liberties protection to states where residents previously had no ACLU affiliate to turn to.
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 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 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
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