- Person
- Aryeh Neier
- Lived
- b. 1937
- Field
- Human rights
- From
- German-born American
The story
Aryeh Neier joined the American Civil Liberties Union in 1963, spending his first year and a half strengthening its state affiliates and founding new ones in Texas and Oklahoma. Then the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who was retiring at 68, asked that Neier, more than 40 years younger, succeed him. Neier directed the NYCLU from 1964 to 1970, responsible for civil liberties work across New York State.
Police abuse was a central issue. Neier's predecessor had begun a push for civilian review of complaints against the police, and it became a huge public battle during Neier's time in New York City, culminating in a referendum campaign that the NYCLU lost.
Neier also took up the rights of people committed, or alleged to need committing, to institutions for the mentally ill. This was the era of giant psychiatric institutions, and the people inside them had few legal protections. The NYCLU began treating their confinement as a civil liberties question, and it also started working on prisoners' rights, abortion as a rights issue and capital punishment.
These were new fronts for civil liberties lawyers, and Neier recalls that the work was grounded almost entirely in the US Constitution rather than in international human rights law. He carried the same concerns to the national ACLU in 1970, where efforts to protect the civil rights of prisoners and people in mental hospitals grew into a national programme while membership rose from 140,000 to 200,000.
Later, as a law professor at New York University, Neier taught a course on how far litigation can change public policy, and where its limits lie, drawing on the lessons of those years. He turned it into a 1982 book, Only Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change. Two earlier books, Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You (1974) and Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution (1976), also date from his civil liberties years.
Why it matters
Neier helped establish that people in police custody, prisons and psychiatric hospitals have rights the law must protect, ideas now central to civil liberties work.
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 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 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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