- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
Aryeh Neier first met the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Roger Baldwin, in 1960 and joined the organisation's staff in 1963, aged 26. After building up its state affiliates and directing the New York Civil Liberties Union from 1964, he became the ACLU's national executive director in 1970.
Under his leadership the organisation's membership grew from 140,000 to 200,000. He used that strength to defend people whom few others would champion. The ACLU under Neier led efforts to protect the civil rights of prisoners and of people held in mental hospitals, at a time when vast institutions held people who had been committed, or were alleged to need committing, with little legal protection. It also campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty and for access to abortion.
The Vietnam War shaped much of the work. Neier recalls that the ACLU represented many thousands of opponents of the war, a major part of what it did in those years. He also took an interest in Soviet dissidents: in 1972, when Soviet officials confiscated the passport of the visiting physicist Valery Chalidze in New York, Neier invited him to the ACLU's offices to tell his story.
Neier's commitment to free expression was tested when the ACLU defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to march in Skokie, Illinois, a town with many Holocaust survivors. Thousands of members resigned. Neier, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, defended the decision in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy, arguing that Jews are best protected by a rule of law that guarantees free speech to everyone.
He spent 15 years at the ACLU in all, eight of them as national executive director, before leaving in 1978 to help found Helsinki Watch. His approach throughout was grounded in the US Constitution: he wanted to deal with the same civil and political rights abroad that he had defended at home.
Why it matters
Neier's ACLU treated the rights of prisoners and psychiatric patients as constitutional questions, helping open courtrooms to people long ignored by the law.
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 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.
- 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 Wikipedia
- Biographical interview with Aryeh Neier Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte
- Aryeh Neier, bio Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
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