Born in Berlin, 1937
Aryeh Neier was born on April 22, 1937, in Berlin, into a Jewish family living under Nazi rule. His father, Wolf Neier, was a language teacher; his mother was Gitla, née Bendzinska; he had a sister eight years older. In 1939, when Aryeh was two, the family fled Germany for England, getting out shortly before the outbreak of war closed most escape routes.
His first year in England was the unhappiest of his childhood. Because his mother had to earn a living, he could not be cared for at home and spent about eleven months in a hostel for refugee children, until his father passed the screening process for refugees, found work and the family could reunite. During the war the family was evacuated from London to Kettering, and at the end of the war they moved to Northampton, where local people and the Jewish community helped them. Only around April 1945, through a Canadian relative working for a refugee agency, did his parents learn what had happened to the family members left behind.
A new start in New York
In 1947 the Neiers emigrated to the United States, living first for a few months in a poor apartment in the Bronx before moving to Brooklyn, where his father found work as a teacher. Aryeh attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan from 1950 to 1954, where he was president of the history club and a keen debater, and then Cornell University, which he could afford through a state scholarship and part-time work; he graduated in 1958.
His political awakening came in the America of the 1950s: McCarthyism, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and a campus fight over a ban on communist speakers. He admired the socialist and civil-liberties campaigner Norman Thomas. After Cornell he went to work for the League for Industrial Democracy, a social-democratic educational group, and was involved in renaming its student wing, in 1960, as Students for a Democratic Society, the organisation that later became the leading voice of the American New Left, though Neier himself never wanted to belong to any party.
Defending liberties at the ACLU
In 1963, at twenty-six, Neier joined the American Civil Liberties Union. He became executive director of its New York affiliate, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and in 1970 national executive director of the ACLU, a post he held until 1978. Under his leadership membership grew substantially, from about 140,000 to about 200,000, and the organisation broadened its agenda.
Neier pushed the ACLU into new territory: the rights of prisoners, the rights of people confined in mental hospitals, the abolition of the death penalty, access to abortion, protection against police abuse and defence of protesters against the Vietnam War. In 1973 the ACLU became the first national organisation to call for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Neier also wrote books exposing the reach of government and private surveillance, including Dossier: The Secret Files They Keep on You (1974).
He also guarded the organisation’s non-partisanship fiercely. In 1976, when the ACLU’s legislative director, Charles Morgan Jr., publicly rebuked a guest at a Washington party who said he would not vote for Jimmy Carter because of his Southern accent, Neier reprimanded Morgan for taking a public position on a candidate for office; Morgan resigned soon afterwards, complaining that the ACLU bureaucracy was restricting what he could say.
Skokie: defending his enemy
The most painful test of Neier’s principles came in 1977–78. A small neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Party of America, sought to march in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a large Jewish population that included many Holocaust survivors. The ACLU defended the group’s right to demonstrate. For Neier, a Jew who had fled Nazi Germany as a child and whose relatives had been murdered, the decision was agonising, and it was bitterly criticised. Around 30,000 members left the ACLU in protest.
Neier explained his reasoning in Defending My Enemy: American Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, and the Risks of Freedom (1979). Jews and other minorities, he argued, are best protected not by giving the state power to silence views it finds hateful, but by an absolute rule of law that protects free expression for everyone, because the power to suppress speech will sooner or later be turned against the vulnerable. The book remains a classic of American free-speech writing, and a new edition with an updating essay was announced for 2025.
Building Human Rights Watch
Leaving the ACLU in 1978, Neier helped found Helsinki Watch, a group created to monitor whether the Soviet Union and other signatories of the 1975 Helsinki Accords were honouring their human-rights commitments. It was followed by Americas Watch and similar committees for other regions, and in 1988 they were united as Human Rights Watch. Neier served as executive director for twelve years and turned it into one of the world’s most influential human-rights organisations.
He shaped its method: careful, on-the-ground investigation, published reports, and pressure on governments, including the United States, to stop supporting abusers. Early on he campaigned against President Reagan’s nominee for the State Department’s top human-rights post, and Argentina’s ‘disappearances’ under military rule led him to make accountability for atrocities a central theme. Unusually for the time, he insisted that the laws of war apply to all sides in armed conflicts, rebels as well as governments. He also helped build support for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established in 1993.
Neier built the organisation’s finances as deliberately as its methods. Early money came from the Ford Foundation, followed by the MacArthur Foundation, individual donors and George Soros. He has said that a diverse base of support allowed Human Rights Watch to turn away donors who tried to influence its policies. He focused its work on civil and political rights, and he has argued that amnesties which abusive regimes grant to themselves are unacceptable, while other amnesties, such as those in South Africa’s transition, must be judged case by case.
Two decades with the Open Society
In 1993 Neier became the first president of George Soros’s Open Society Institute, later the Open Society Foundations, and led it until 2012. During those years the network grew into one of the world’s largest private funders of civil society, supporting independent media, legal reform, education and the rule of law, particularly in countries emerging from communism and dictatorship. He backed institutions of international justice, including the International Criminal Court, the International Center for Transitional Justice and the Center for Justice and Accountability.
He was candid about the power such a philanthropy holds. Soros’s money, he acknowledged, gave the foundations considerable influence, which he believed made transparency all the more important. After stepping down he became president emeritus, and taught for several years at the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po, having earlier spent more than a decade as an adjunct professor of law at New York University.
A refugee’s convictions
Neier has described himself as not religious; Jewish identity, he has said, mattered more to his parents than to him. Yet his life’s work is hard to separate from his history. A child who survived because a democracy took in refugees, he devoted his career to the idea that the rights of every individual must be defended everywhere, including, as Skokie showed, the rights of people he despised.
That conviction has continued to lead him into controversy. In 2024, writing in The New York Review of Books, he concluded that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, a judgement that drew strong disagreement from many in the Jewish world and beyond, while being welcomed by others. Neier has long been a frequent contributor to the Review, as well as to The New York Times, The Washington Post and Foreign Policy, and for years wrote a human-rights column for The Nation.
Writer and witness
Alongside his institutional work, Neier has written a shelf of books that trace the evolution of the human-rights movement he helped create: Crime and Punishment: A Radical Solution (1976); Only Judgment: The Limits of Litigation in Social Change (1982); War Crimes: Brutality, Terror, and the Struggle for Justice (1998); a memoir, Taking Liberties: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights (2003); and The International Human Rights Movement: A History (2012).
He is married to Yvette Celton and has one child. His honours include seven honorary degrees and awards from the American Bar Association, the International Bar Association and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Legacy
Few people have shaped the modern human-rights movement as directly as Aryeh Neier. He helped transform the ACLU from a defender of free speech into a broad champion of the rights of prisoners, patients and the powerless; he co-founded and built Human Rights Watch, whose reports now shape headlines and diplomacy around the world; and he steered one of the largest philanthropies devoted to open societies through the decades after the Cold War.
The architecture he helped construct, independent monitors, documented evidence, international courts and the expectation that those who commit atrocities may one day be held to account, is now part of the ordinary landscape of international affairs. It was built, in no small part, by a boy who left Berlin in 1939 and never stopped thinking about what happens when no one defends the rights of others.
Sources & further reading
Aryeh Neier, Wikipedia · Aryeh Neier, interview, Quellen zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte · Aryeh Neier, Aurora Humanitarian Initiative · Aryeh Neier, The Nation · Aryeh Neier, Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.