- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
In the early 1980s wars were raging in El Salvador and Guatemala, and soon in Nicaragua, while the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Many thousands of civilian noncombatants were being killed. Yet at the time the leading human rights groups, following Amnesty International's approach, dealt only with abuses that violated United Nations treaties. The laws of war had developed outside the UN system, which left most wartime atrocities beyond their reach.
Aryeh Neier, building Helsinki Watch and the new Americas Watch, decided early on that his organisation would also report on violations of the Geneva Conventions and other laws of armed conflict. He reasoned that human rights law generally limits governments, whereas the laws of war apply equally to all sides. That allowed researchers to criticise abuses by guerrillas as well as by governments without appearing to take sides in the war itself.
Neier also chose to focus on conduct in war rather than on who started it. Deciding who was the aggressor, he argued, usually requires a political judgement, and once one side is labelled the aggressor, abuses by the other side can come to seem forgivable. He wanted a position that condemned certain practices whoever engaged in them.
The decision had costs. Key funding staff at the Ford Foundation, which had given Helsinki Watch its first grant, came from Amnesty and disagreed with the new approach, and Ford reduced its support. Because the organisation had diverse donors, it could hold its ground. The watch committees also went beyond politically motivated cases to cover ordinary police abuse and conditions in ordinary prisons.
Neier argued the case at conferences, including those Amnesty organised on the subject, and Amnesty eventually broadened its own mandate to cover armed conflict, a change he says took about ten years. Today, he notes, Amnesty has if anything a broader agenda than Human Rights Watch.
Why it matters
Monitoring the laws of war became a standard part of human rights reporting, giving civilians caught in conflicts a voice regardless of who was attacking them.
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.
- 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'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
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