Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power Honoring Aryeh Neier with his Lifetime Achievement Award

Note: These remarks were delivered after Amb. Power's service as U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

In presenting Aryeh Neier with his Lifetime Achievement Award tonight, I could just read his CV out loud.

Longtime national executive director of the ACLU. Founder of Helsinki Watch and Americas Watch. Longtime executive director of Human Rights Watch. President of the Open Society Institute from 1993 to 2012, where – working with George Soros – he built the infrastructure for holding accountable governments in vast stretches of Eastern Europe, Africa Asia, and Latin America.

Aryeh Neier -- a child refugee from Nazi Germany, who came to the United States as a ten-year-old boy – has arguably done more than any single individual to build the modern human rights movement. This is not hyperbole. This is what one exceedingly stubborn, supremely decent person did. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Aryeh believed in and built institutions whose shadows – can there be shadows of light? -- are now everywhere.

By building a movement fueled by individuals, but embedded in institutions, Aryeh has helped create something that can bend but will not break. Human rights are under ferocious pressure right now, but its guardians are built to last. That durability is perhaps Aryeh’s greatest achievement.

The man we are honoring tonight became a giant in human rights very young; but he never lost his capacity to be blown away by the work of activists in the trenches. It has often been noted that the money he has raised or given away exceeds the GDP of most UN member states. But less remarked upon is the army of human rights foot soldiers who have been inspired or supported by him – in whose exploits he simply delights. Aryeh is generally so serious and so reserved that, as a friend of mine who has risked her life in countless places put it, when Aryeh Neier brightens – speaking with pride about some courageous activist somewhere; or appreciating something he hears, “one feels one has received the Legion d’Honneur from his hands.”

Now what is the relationship between the causes the International Women’s Health Coalition have championed and the man we are honoring tonight? For starters, women are people, people have rights, and those rights should not be violated. Thus, it is of course in the interest of the Coalition and its supporters to champion human rights advocacy, human rights naming and shaming, and human rights legal enforcement of the kind that Aryeh Neier helped pioneer. When the door is shut to refugees, girl children will be even less likely to get educated than the boys. When undocumented immigrants face deportation, mothers will share the terror of having a wall placed between them and their kids.  Put in its more positive form, when Aryeh Neier personally helped engineer the creation of the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the courts prosecuted the perpetrators of atrocities, and in so doing found for the first time that rape could be a form of genocide.

But Aryeh’s work on behalf of women was not just an intrinsic subset of his larger human rights work. Aryeh took up the very specific cause of the rights of women in each of his varied roles. When he was director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, in his 20s, he filed a lawsuit against airlines requiring female flight attendants to retire when they "aged out" at 32. When he ran the ACLU, he helped drive the legal and political fight against criminal sanctions for women seeking abortion. When he led Human Rights Watch, he expanded the organization’s writ to cover women’s rights specifically. Some objected when he had HRW take on violence against women, arguing that the organization shouldn’t take on violence by private persons, such as husbands beating their wives. But Aryeh argued rightly that a state’s failure to punish those who committed violence against women was a core human rights issue.

In holding governments and others accountable for what had never even been measured before, he created not only a powerful nudge, but he helped affirm that women’s rights were a subject for grown-ups, worthy of congressional legislation and courtroom adjudication. As a remarkable leader would proclaim six years after Aryeh founded the HRW Women’s Rights division, “women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” For Aryeh, too, that was an axiom.

But enough about Aryeh. Let’s talk about us. What is our responsibility now that so much of the edifice that Aryeh helped build is coming under assault? What does this self-made man’s journey of impact teach us?

First, although Aryeh believes that rights are rights and should never be subject to political compromise, he always understood the importance of politics. He saw early that there had to be a division of labor among us; and turning the political tide is often what will bring about the enforcement of human rights. The ACLU may use the courts, Human Rights Watch may write the report documenting the atrocities of governments and paramilitaries, but it was political action and political pressure that would improve the largest numbers of lives. Politics have failed us on human rights of late; but Aryeh has taught us that in the long run there really is no door #2. It is through political action – led by ordinary people, citizens, like the ones in this room – that our politicians will again be rendered capable of shame, and that they will be made to bear a cost for being bystanders rather than upstanders; that democracy will protect the rights of the individual and that rights will check the executive.

Second, Aryeh was a master of what I would call bank-shot human rights diplomacy. It just may be the case that senior officials in the Trump Administration do not care about what any of us here tonight think about their decision to reinstitute the global gag rule. But I bet someone senior in this administration cares about what someone you know thinks about the global gag rule. Maybe that someone is a wealthy donor who just hates the thought of 20,000 needless additional mothers’ deaths? Maybe the someone is a minister of a wealthy European country with deep pockets willing to make up for the colossal loss in funding to the organizations that empower those same mothers? We are living in a world of echo chambers – who do you know who has influence in someone else’s echo chamber? Aryeh always got creative – we must too.

And third, and finally, Aryeh made a very different kind of impact in each of the three big chapters of his life – revolutionizing respect for liberty at home, making governments including our own accountable for human rights abuses abroad, and literally building and growing civil society and independent media as a check and balance all around the world. Millions and millions of lives were changed. That is the lesson of Aryeh’s life I want to conclude with.  All of us are spending a lot of time sighing – or screaming out loud – at President Trump’s latest falsehood, fear-mongering, or cold-hearted act of injustice. But our sorrow and anger won’t take us very far if it is not rendered actionable. If you can march, march. If you can run for office, run for office. If you help fund an organization like this one, write a bigger check. If none of these forms of action feel right, then please find your thing. I am reminded here of one of the many memorable signs held up at the Women’s March: “I’M NORMALLY NOT A SIGN GUY BUT GEEZ…”

Nothing any of us do feels commensurate to the rollback of human rights we are experiencing right now at home and abroad. But if each of us stretches ourselves well beyond what we have done before – and what we think ourselves capable of – we can underwrite what is being defunded by our government; we can find partners in other countries – and new partners at home -- who will step up in fresh ways; and we will undo the damage being done — inspired by the example set by a refugee from Nazi Germany who has never stopped coming up with new ways to improve America and improve the world. Aryeh understood freedom is a right, but never a given. Freedom requires generations of grinding, bruising work – it requires each of us to find a way to dance with the shadows of justice that one man has made.

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