Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

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Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (born 1947) is an American lawyer, writer, and historian. He is president of the PEN Club in the French part of Switzerland and was formerly a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Secretary of the Human Rights Committee, and the Chief of Petitions.

De Zayas has written and lectured extensively on human rights subjects, including the jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Armenian Genocide, the US-run prisons at Guantanamo Bay, "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia, the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, and the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in 1974. He is an advocate of "the right to homeland" as a universal human right.

While his literary work, numerous human rights publications and peace activism are mainstream, he became controversial in 1975 when he published a seminal article in the Harvard International Law Journal ("International Law and Mass Population Transfers", Vol. 16, p. 207-258) in which he questioned the legality of the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homelands after WWII, invoking the Atlantic Charter, the Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles. The article was followed by his book "Nemesis at Potsdam" (Routledge, 1977), focusing on the degree of responsibility of the Anglo-Americans for decisions leading to the expulsion of the Germans. In the same year an enlarged German edition was published by the foremost legal editor in Germany, C.H. Beck, becoming an instant bestseller, quickly reissued by Germany's largest pocketbook publisher dtv. De Zayas thus became the first American historian to break the tabu about this hitherto neglected topic. His second book, "The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau" (University of Nebraska Press) was published in Germany By Universitas/Langen Müller to long and positive reviews in the Spiegel, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, American Journal of International Law, Cambridge Law Journal, and similarly became a bestseller. This book describes the work of a little known bureau in the legal department of the Wehrmacht, which investigated alleged Allied war crimes, including the murder of Ukrainians by the NKWD 1941 in Lviv, the murder of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn 1940, and the sinking of the German hospital ship "Tübingen" by the British in 1944. De Zayas was the first researcher to see and evaluate the 226 volumes of extant records of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchunsstelle, which had been classified documents in the United States and had just been returned by the US National Archives to the German Bundesarchiv. The book became the basis of a prime-time television documentary of the ARD/WDR (German channel 1), broadcast to highest viewership on 18 and 21 March 1983. De Zayas gave a series of guest lectures of the Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle at many universities in Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, including All Souls College, Oxford, in 1990. While the book and the television program were well received in the academic world, they were savagely attacked in the media of the then Soviet Union and its satellites. Notwithstanding criticism from some left wing historians in Germany, the books have remained in print for thirty years and reached the 14th and 7th revised editions, respectively. Since his retirement from the UN in 2003, de Zayas has become a vocal critic of the Iraq war, of indefinite detention in Guantanamo, of secret CIA prisons, and also of political correctness. In this connection he has been compared with Noam Chomsky.

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[edit] Biography

Born to a family of Spanish and French descent, de Zayas grew up in Chicago. He earned his juris doctor from Harvard Law School and a doctorate of philosophy in modern history from the Georg-August University of Göttingen. He practiced corporate law in New York and family law in Florida, as member of the New York Bar and Florida Bar. He also was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tübingen and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg.

During the course of his legal and academic career, he has been a visiting professor of international law and of world history at a number of institutions, including the Graduate Institute of International Studies (Geneva), the DePaul University College of Law (Chicago), the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, the Schiller International University (Leysin), the Académie Internationale de Droit Constitutionnel (Tunis), the University of Trier, the Santa Clara Law School, the Center for Applied Studies in International Negotiations (CASIN, Genève), and the Universitad de Alcala de Henares (Madrid). He has been member of doctoral commissions at the universities of Geneva, Amsterdam and Alcala de Henares.

De Zayas regularly publishes op-ed articles and essays in German and Swiss newspapers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Das Parlament, Der Spiegel, Bayernkurier, Zeit Fragen, and the Tribune de Genève. He has made television appearances on round tables and panels for CNN, WDR, WDR's Monitor, Phoenix, 3sat, ZDF, ZDF-Magazin, Aschaffenburger Gespräche, Bayerischer Rundfunk etc.

De Zayas resides with his Dutch wife in Geneva.

[edit] Civic activities

Da Zayas was co-President with Jacqueline Berenstein Wavre of the Association Suisses et Internationaux de Genève (1996-2006) and is currently treasurer of Millennium Solidarity, a Geneva non-governmental organization working for world peace and the eradication of poverty. He is a member of the Asociacion Española para el Desarrollo del Derecho Internacional de los Derechos Humanos(AEDIDH), which in October 2006 produced the "Luarca Declaration on the Human Right to Peace". He has represented AEDIDH, the International P.E.N. and the International Society for Human Rights at round tables at the United Nations in Geneva. He has appeared as an expert witness in United States federal courts and before the German Parliament.

De Zayas is a member of the German Society for International Law and the Centre Against Expulsions, Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen. He sits in the advisory boards of several organizations, including the Internationale Gesellschaft für Menschenrechte in Frankfurt, and is a member of the International Expert Panel for a European Solution in Cyprus (2004-2007). He served for 15 years as president of the United Nations Society of Writers (Geneva) and as of 2007 is still editor-in-chief of the UN literary review Ex Tempore ISSN 1020-6604, which has hitherto published 17 issues. A member of International PEN since 1989, he was secretary of the Swiss-French PEN 2002-06 and is currently its president. He has published poetry in English, French, German, Spanish, and Dutch, and translated Rainer Maria Rilke into English, French, and Spanish, Joseph von Eichendorff and Hermann Hesse into English. De Zayas received the "Plakete für Verdienste für das Selbstbestimmungsrecht" in 1997, the "Humanitas Ring" in 1998, the Walter Eckart Prize for History in 2001, the ANC Scholarly Excellence Award (Los Angeles) in 2003 and a Menschenrechtspreis in Munich in 2004.

[edit] Selected works

  • Nemesis at Potsdam: the Expulsion of the Germans from the East. Preface by Ambassador Robert Murphy. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989. (1st edition published in 1977 in London and Boston by Routledge) ISBN 0-8032-4910-1 Updated seventh edition published 2003 by Picton Press in Rockland, Maine. ISBN 0-89725-360-4. Critically acclaimed in the American Journal of International Law, Herald Tribune, Times Educational Supplement, Choice. German version, Die Nemesis von Potsdam, Die Anglo-Amerikaner und die Vertreibung der Deutschen (original version with C.H.Beck, Muenchen, then dtv and Ullstein), 14th revised edition, Herbig, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-7766-2454-X, critically acclaimed in die Zeit, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
  • A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. ISBN 1-4039-7308-3. Preface by Professor Charles Barber. New revised edition with Palgrave/Macmillan, New York 2006, ISBN-10: 1-4939-7308-3. Critically acclaimed in the London Times, Publishers' Weekly, Army, Netherlands International Law Review. German version, "Die deutschen Vertriebenen", fifth revised edition with Leopold Stocker Verlag (Ares), Graz, Austria 2006, critically acclaimed in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
  • The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945. (With Walter Rabus.) Preface by Professor Howard Levie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8032-9908-7. New revised edition with Picton Press, Rockland, Maine, ISBN 0-89725-421-X.The author was interviewed by CNN on this book on 4 April 1990. Critically acclaimed in the American Journal of International Law, Cambridge Law Journal, Archiv des Völkerrechts. Parts of the book are reproduced for study purposes in the Red Cross Handbook "How does Law Protect in War?" edited by Marco Sassoli and Antoine Bouvier, ICRC, Geneva 1999.ISBN 2-88145-110-1.
  • Heimatrecht ist Menschenrecht. Auf dem Weg zu einer Weltkonvention. (The Right to the Homeland is a Human Right: Towards an International Convention.) Universitas Verlag, 2001. ISBN 3-8004-1416-3.
  • "Rainer Maria Rilke. Die Larenopfer" Bilingual English-German edition with commentary. Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2005. ISBN 1-59709-010-7.
  • "Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts" Universitas Verlag, München, 7th revised edition 2001, prior editions with Ullstein Verlag, Berlin.Critically acclaimed in Die Zeit, Die Welt, Spiegel. A prime time television special based on this book was aired in Channel 1 of German national television ARD/WDR on 18 and 21 March 1983. Issued in 2005 as DVD by Polar Film, ISBN-10: 3937163859.
  • "International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms", co-editor and co-author with Gudmundur Alfredsson and Bertram Ramcharan , Kluwer, The Hague, 2001. New revised edition 2007.
  • "Human Rights in the Administration of Criminal Justice" in collaboration with Professor Cherif Bassiouni, Transnational Press, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-941320-87-1
  • "Ethnic Cleansing: Applicable Norms, Emerging Jurisprudence, Implementable Remedies" in John Carey (ed.) International Humanitarian Law: Origins, Transnational Press, New York 2003, pp. 283-307.
  • 18 entries in the Encyclopaedia of Public International Law, edited by Rudolf Bernhardt, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Vol. 1-5, 1992-2003, including "United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights", "Combatants", "Spanish Civil War", "Population Expulsion", "Repatriation", "Open Towns", "Curzon Line", "United States Dependent Territories", "European Recovery Program", etc.
  • "Die amerikanische Besetzung Guantánamos", Institut für Rechtspolitik an der Universität Trier, Rechtspolitisches Forum Nr. 28, 2005, ISSN 1616-8828.
  • "The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights" in Helmut Volger (ed.) Concise Encyclopaedia of the United Nations, Kluwer, The Hague, 2002.
  • "Karl Ernst Smidt" in Biographisches Lexikon für Ostfriesland, Aurich 2007.
  • "The Procedures and Case-Law of the United Nations Human Rights Committee" in Carlos Jiménez Piernas, The Legal Practice in International Law and European Community Law, Martinus Nijhoff, Leiden 2007.
  • "Der Krieg im ehemaligen Yugoslawien aus völkerrechtlicher Sicht" in Tilman Zülch (ed.) "Ethnische Säuberung-Völkermord", Luchterhand, Hamburg 1993.
  • Poetry in English, French, Spanish, German and Russian published in various literary journals and newspapers.

[edit] External links

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