Human Rights and Their Limits

President
Open Society Foundations

Aryeh Neier is president of the Open Society Foundations. Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations in 1993, he served for 12 years as executive director of Human Rights Watch, of which he was a founder in 1978. Before that, he worked 15 years at the American Civil Liberties Union, including eight years as national executive director. He served as an adjunct professor of law at New York University for more than a dozen years.

Neier is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has published in periodicals such as the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Foreign Policy. For a dozen years he wrote a column on human rights for The Nation. He has contributed more than a 150 op-ed articles in newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and the International Herald Tribune. Author of six books, including his most recent, Taking Liberties (2003), Neier has also contributed chapters to more than 20 books.

He has lectured at many of the country’s leading universities. He is the recipient of six honorary degrees and the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award and the International Bar Association’s Rule of Law Award.

Wiktor Osiatyński is a professor at the Central European University in Budapest, where he teaches at the CEU Legal Program. He is a former codirector of the Chicago Law School's Center for the Study of Constitutionalism in Eastern Europe and an advisor to a number of constitutional committees in Poland's parliament.

The author of more than 20 books, Osiatyński serves on the boards of the Open Society Institute, Open Society Justice Initiative, and Human Rights and Governance Grant Program. In 2007, he cofounded the Women's Party in Poland.

Richard A. Wilson is the Gladstein Distinguished Chair of Human Rights, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.

He is the author of numerous works on human rights, truth commissions and international criminal tribunals, including the books Maya Resurgence in Guatemala (1995) and The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (2001) and the edited or co-edited books Low Intensity Democracy (1993), Human Rights, Culture and Context (1997), Culture and Rights (2001), Human Rights in Global Perspective (2003), Human Rights and the "War on Terror" (2005) and Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (2008, Cambridge University Press). Presently he holds a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is writing a book, "Judging History: The Use of Historical and Social Science Evidence in International Criminal Trials."

Wilson is the chair of the Connecticut State Advisory Committee of the US Civil Rights Commission and is a member of the Committee for Human Rights of the American Anthropological Association.  He is associate editor of the Journal of Human Rights.