Obituary:
Thomas Buergenthal, Human Rights Lawyer, 89
Buergenthal was an international law jurist and human rights defender who was as a boy one of the youngest survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as a three-day Nazi death march to Sachsenhausen, Germany. He had a major role in establishing international jurisprudence's framework, stemming from U.N. declarations since the 1960s often called the “International Bill of Human Rights.” In 1992, the U. S. ratified the core document, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
As a justice of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979-1991), Buergenthal judged cases about allegations of rights abuses by U.S.-allied governments in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras against leftist guerrillas and their supporters. One case, the disappearance of suspected government opponents in Honduras, led to new interpretations of the burden of proof. Buergenthal and the other judges decided that it could consider the overall pattern of disappearances, setting a “rebuttable presumption” of government involvement. Authorities would now have to prove they had no role in a specific incident, rather than relying on a lack of evidence to exonerate them. In 1993, Buergenthal was part of a U.N. commission that found Salvadoran military officers responsible for so-called “dirty war” crimes, including the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.
Buergenthal was vice chairman of the Claims Resolution Tribunal, which examined requests made by the families of Holocaust victims seeking assets deposited in Swiss banks until 1945. Tens of millions of dollars were estimated to be in accounts hidden from heirs by Swiss banking laws. He also wrote a memoir A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy (See Interesting Books in this issue). He also served as a judge at the International Court of Justice, honorary president of the American Society of International Law (2001-2009), and as a law professor.
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Sources:
Photo courtesy of the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
