The Center for Constitutional Rights mourns the passing of Peter Weiss, the visionary human rights lawyer, our beloved mentor and friend, and our long-time vice president, who served on our board for nearly five decades. Peter expertly litigated dozens of cases with generations of advocates here, including the landmark case Filártiga v. Peña-Irala with Rhonda Copelon, but it was his groundbreaking vision beyond the courtroom that shaped who we are as an organization. He brought an internationalist perspective into our work and showed us how to demand that the law conform with the dictates of justice – universal justice, the only true kind. He passed away on November 3, 2025, just five weeks shy of his 100th birthday.
In his early history, you can see the seeds of his life’s work. Born in Vienna in 1925, Peter came to the United States in 1941 as a Holocaust refugee who had family members, including his grandfather, murdered in Nazi gas chambers. As a member of the U.S. army, Peter worked to dismantle German business cartels that had assisted the Nazis and, as a military interrogator, helped prepare for the Nuremberg Trials of German business leaders. It was the beginning of an illustrious career in which he relentlessly opposed brutality and championed accountability.
So varied, numerous, and significant were Peter’s contributions to international and human rights law and social movements that it is impossible to detail them all in this space. He was involved in many of the most urgent human rights issues of his lifetime, from ending South African Apartheid to the Vietnam War to nuclear disarmament, including as the long-time president of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, to the U.S.-backed coup in Chile to the atrocities committed by the Nicaraguan Contras to the Bush administration’s so-called “War on Terror,” to corporate accountability.
In 1970, when news of the My Lai massacre broke, Peter researched how to try to hold the perpetrators accountable. With another Center for Constitutional Rights hero, Rhonda Copelon (1944-2010), he rediscovered the Alien Tort Statute or ATS, a 1789 law that gives federal courts jurisdiction over international law tort claims brought by non-U.S. citizens. Soon after, in a stroke of genius, they used the ATS to hold a Paraguayan official accountable inside the U.S. for the torture and murder of the son of a Paraguayan dissident. In the landmark decision in 1980, Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, the Second Circuit famously branded the torturer “an enemy of all mankind.”
The ruling ushered in a new era in human rights law, spawning a legal movement for transnational justice and accountability. Then, Peter and Center for Constitutional Rights legendary attorney, legal director, and board president Michael Ratner (1943-2016), championed the use of “universal jurisdiction” to make U.S. officials answerable for the grave crimes committed through the Bush administration’s global torture program, turning to courts around the world for justice when U.S. courts refused to hold their own accountable.
Peter’s universalist vision continues to inspire our work. A deep believer that corporations must not be allowed to profit from their role in human suffering, Peter was with us in spirit last year when a Virginia jury ordered a private U.S. military contractor to pay millions in damages to Iraqis who endured torture at Abu Ghraib prison.
We send our condolences and love to Cora Weiss, his partner in marriage and human rights advocacy for more than sixty years, and all of Peter’s family. Peter was the best of who we are, our heart, our moral compass, our beacon. We will miss him terribly, and we will do our best to honor his memory by continuing to seek a world where justice is, as it must be, universal.
