Aryeh Neier is an influential American human rights activist, legal scholar, and co-founder of Human Rights Watch. Born in 1937 to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany, he fled Nazi persecution as a two-year-old child, arriving in the United Kingdom as a refugee before immigrating to the United States.
Neier served as National Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1970 to 1978, during which he defended First Amendment free speech rights in the controversial 1977 Skokie case involving neo-Nazi demonstrators in Illinois. In 1978, he co-founded Helsinki Watch, which later expanded into Human Rights Watch (HRW), serving as its executive director for 12 years. From 1993 to 2012, he served as president of the Open Society Foundations.
As a scholar and veteran human rights practitioner, Neier has long analyzed international humanitarian law and civilian protection in armed conflict. In June 2024, writing for The New York Review of Books, Neier reversed his earlier caution regarding legal definitions and stated: “I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.“ He based his legal assessment on evidence showing sustained obstruction of food, water, and medical supplies to Gaza’s civilian population, arguing that using starvation as a method of warfare fulfills the criteria established under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Neier rejects arguments that equate criticism of Israeli military policy with antisemitism, emphasizing that human rights standards and opposition to state violence must be applied universally without exception. Neier is also one of the signatories of the 2025 public statement, “Global Jewish Call on the UN and World Leaders to Sanction Israel.”