Aryeh Neier – författare

A fascinating history of the international human rights movement as seen by one of its foundersDuring the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in struggles against totalitarian regimes and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier—a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement—offers a comprehensive, authoritative account of this global force, from its beginnings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to its essential place in world affairs today. Neier combines analysis with personal experience, and gives an insider’s perspective on the movement’s goals, the disputes about its mission, its rise to international importance, and the challenges to come. This updated edition includes a new preface by the author.

Since joining the staff of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1963 and becoming its youngest executive director, Aryeh Neier has been at the forefront of efforts to fight for civil liberties, human rights, and social justice. Whether he was confronting police abuse, defending draft opponents or defending free speech, as he did at the ACLU out-maneuvering the Reagan administration over military abuses in El Salvador, promoting accountability for political crimes in Argentina and Chile or supporting dissidents in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as he did at Human Rights Watch or trying to eradicate landmines, promote stability in the Balkans or establish an International Criminal Court, as he has at the Open Society Institute Aryeh Neier has been methodical, relentless, and unusually successful. In this look back at an amazing career, Neier both reflects on the unintended consequences of some of his victories and why, if he had anticipated them, he might have done things differently and reveals that some of the various movements of which he was a part had their greatest triumphs under the most adverse circumstances.

With a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by Nadine StrossenA new edition of the most important free speech book of the past half-century, with a new chapter by the author on some of the top First Amendment controversies of today“If Aryeh Neier had done nothing else in his absolutely towering human rights, civil liberties career other than write Defending My Enemy, that still would have made him a hero and a giant.”—Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties UnionWhen Nazis wanted to express their right to free speech in 1977 by marching through Skokie, Illinois—a town with a large population of Holocaust survivors—Aryeh Neier, then the national executive director of the ACLU and himself a Holocaust survivor, came to the Nazis’ defense. Explaining what many saw as a despicable bridge too far for the First Amendment, Neier spelled out his thoughts about free speech in his 1979 book Defending My Enemy.Nearly fifty years later, Neier revisits the topic of free speech in a volume that includes his original essay along with a new chapter addressing present-day First Amendment battles, including the Charlottesville march, book bans, the heckler’s veto, attacks on free speech on college campuses, and the threat to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court decision in The New York Times v. Sullivan.Including a foreword by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and an afterword by longtime free speech champion Nadine Strossen, Defending My Enemy offers razor-sharp analysis from the man Jameel Jaffer of the Knight First Amendment Institute describes as “an icon of justice and fearlessness.”

En abril de 1977 el partido nazi estadounidense pretendía manifestarse en Skokie, una localidad del Estado de Illinois donde residía la mayor comunidad de supervivientes del Holocausto en Estados Unidos después de Nueva York. La marcha del pequeño grupo de simpatizantes nazis suponía un agravio para las víctimas, pero el sistema jurídico garantizaba el derecho de «los otros» a expresarse, incluso si las camisas pardas y la esvástica de los brazaletes supusiesen una incitación al racismo y la segregación religiosa. El asunto generó una diatriba judicial y moral que Aryeh Neier explica en Defendiendo a mi enemigo: nazis americanos en Skokie y los riesgos de la libertad. Neier, quien fuera un niño judío que pudo escapar de Berlín junto con su familia en 1939, en su condición de presidente del American Civil Liberties Union decidió asumir la defensa de los miembros del partido nazi para que pudiesen manifestarse en Skokie. De acuerdo con Neier la defensa del enemigo era la única forma de proteger una sociedad basada en libertades democráticas. Neier plantea y nos comparte su dilema: «Y yo, siendo judío, ¿cómo puedo negarme a defender la libertad, aunque sea para los nazis?». «Quienes hayan sufrido en carne propia el asedio, la persecución o el desmantelamiento de las instituciones y la justicia, encontrarán en estas páginas un eco de lucidez y un espacio para la reflexión. Pero, sobre todo, para aquellos que ignoran o subestiman los peligros que acechan a las democracias y los derechos humanos, las palabras de Neier cobran una vigencia y universalidad todavía mayores.