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Aryeh Neier Laudatio Aryeh Neier Laudatio Aryeh Neier is one of the world’s leading advocates for open society. Founder of two great international human rights organizations, and one-time director of the leading civil liberties organization in the US, Aryeh has been at the center of the global rights movement for more than half a century. He has led campaigns for freedom of expression, criminal justice reform, racial and gender equality, personal privacy, international justice and accountability for crimes against humanity and genocide. To do so, he has developed unparalleled expertise, encyclopedic knowledge and an uncanny ability to marshal arguments and people to advance the cause of human rights. Born in Nazi Germany, Aryeh and his family escaped to England on the eve of World War II. As an American university student, he was inspired by the 1956 Hungarian revolution to start a campus forum on freedom and justice. In 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Aryeh joined the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union, where he participated in the struggle for racial desegregation in America. In 1970, he was chosen to direct the ACLU, and he led it through intense controversies over freedoms of speech and assembly during the Vietnam War. Later, he mobilized to defend civil liberties against massive abuses by the Nixon Administration. In 1974, President Nixon was held responsible for these crimes, impeached in the US House of Representatives and forced to resign from office in 1974. But even the impeachment of a president was less controversial than Aryeh’s courageous defense of the freedoms of those with whom he most intensely disagreed – a small band of Neo-Nazis who sought to march through the heavily Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois, where there were many Holocaust survivors. He wrote at the time that “Rights are only meaningful if they apply to all, regardless of the views they espouse,” and that no minority, including Jews, are safe unless all minority viewpoints are protected against discrimination. In 1978 Aryeh turned his attention to the international denial of freedom of speech, and he founded Helsinki Watch. Basing the new organization on the Helsinki Accords and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he mobilized support for Central European and Soviet dissidents and political prisoners. The Watch Committees lobbied the United States and other governments to adopt policies to protect international human rights and hold accountable those responsible for their violation. By the time he left fifteen years later, Aryeh had built Human Rights Watch into one of the best known and most effective centers of human rights advocacy in the world. In 1993 George Soros asked Aryeh Neier to work with him to create a new organization dedicated to the principles of open society in a world transformed by dramatic political, economic and social change. The Open Society Institute became a major source of support for human rights and democracy in countries emerging from authoritarian rule. Under Aryeh’s leadership OSI pioneered the development of a system of international justice to hold 1 accountable the perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity in failed states like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Working in every part of the globe, today the Open Society Foundations administer the world’s largest private grant program to protect and improve the lives of people in marginalized communities; to implement initiatives advancing justice, education, public health and independent media; and to strengthen the rule of law, democratic institutions, and civil societies that can keep government power in check. For these extraordinary lifetime achievements, Aryeh Neier is honored by Central European University with the 2012 Open Society Prize. 2.
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