Aryeh Neier
War Crimes

Since September 1993, Aryeh Neier has served as president of the Soros Foundations and of the Open Society Institute. For the previous 12 years, he was executive director of Human Rights Watch, and before that, he served for 15 years with the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national director.

Mr. Neier also served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University for more than a dozen years. He has been a columnist for The Nation, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and has also published in such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Foreign Policy, and in a number of law journals. He has contributed more than a hundred op-ed articles to newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The International Herald Tribune. Author of four books, with a fifth in progress, Mr. Neier has also contributed chapters to more than 25 books. He has lectured at most of the country's leading universities and has appeared frequently on such television programs as "Nightline," the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour," and the "Today" show.

Mr. Neier has played a leading role in the establishment of an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia. He has conducted investigations of human rights abuses in more than 40 countries around the world. Over the last decade, he has been directly engaged in many global debates about bringing to justice those who have committed crimes against humanity, the subject of his coming book.

Mr. Neier was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee at an early age. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from the State University of New York (Binghamton), Hofstra University and Hamilton College and of the American Bar Association's Gavel Award.