Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas (born 31 May 1947) is a Cuban-born American lawyer and writer, active in the field of human rights and international law.

He has written and lectured extensively on human rights, including the jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the US-run detention centers at Guantanamo Bay, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in 1974, the rights of minorities, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the rights of indigenous peoples.

In 1975, de Zayas published a study in the Harvard International Law Journal, questioning the legality of the expulsion of possibly as many as 15 million Germans from their homes after World War II, invoking the Atlantic Charter, the Hague Conventions, and the Nuremberg Principles.

De Zayas, in collaboration with Justice Jakob Möller, authored the book United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law 1977-2008 (2009), published by N. P. Engel Verlag.

The first Chairman of the Human Rights Committee, Andreas Mavrommatis, wrote a preface for the handbook.

In a review published in the UN Special magazine, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Bertrand Ramcharan wrote: "It is staggering how much the Human Rights Committee has influenced the human rights jurisprudence of the world, as is striking from reading this exceedingly important book.... From the outset of its work in 1977 there have been two Secretariat pioneers in developing the case law of the Committee when it considers petitions from individuals claiming violations of their rights: Jakob Möller (Iceland) and Alfred de Zayas (USA). Möller was the first Chief of the Petitions branch of what is today the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and de Zayas was his colleague, who eventually succeeded him as Chief."

De Zayas has written scholarly articles that were published in the Harvard International Law Journal, the UBC Law Review, the International Review of the Red Cross, the Criminal Law Forum, the Refugee Survey Quarterly, the Netherlands International Law Review, The International Commission of Jurists Review, the Historical Journal, Politique internationale, the German Yearbook of International Law, Canadian Human Rights Yearbook and the East European Quarterly.

He has co-authored and co-edited books such as The International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms.

De Zayas has published chapters in books Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe co-edited by Steven Várdy and Hunt Tooley.

In International Humanitarian Law: Origins, edited by John Carey, de Zayas wrote the chapter "Ethnic Cleansing, Applicable Norms, Emerging Jurisprudence, Implementable Remedies".

His chapter in Spanish "El crimen contra la paz" was published in the book La Declaración de Luarca sobre el Derecho Humano a la Paz, edited by Carmen Rosa Rueda Castañón and Carlos Villán Durán.

De Zayas' work into the expulsion of Germans from areas of eastern Germany and Eastern Europe at the end of World War II is extensive.

De Zayas was reportedly the first American historian to address this topic.

The article was followed by his first book Nemesis at Potsdam (Routledge und Kegan Paul, 1977) which focused on what, if any, responsibility the British and U.S. governments had for decisions which purportedly led to the expulsions of these ethnic Germans.

The book had a preface by Dwight Eisenhower's political advisor, Robert Daniel Murphy, a participant at the Potsdam conference.

British historian Tony Howarth reviewed it in the Times Educational Supplement as "a lucid, scholarly and compassionate study".

Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz wrote in the American Journal of International Law that it was "a persuasive commentary on the suffering which becomes inevitable when humanitarianism is subordinated to nationalism".

The New Statesman reviewer stated: "in his well researched, closely reasoned work, de Zayas leaves little doubt that there have been few historical parallels to this record of modern mass atrocity".

In the same year, an enlarged German edition was published by the legal publisher C.H. Beck, becoming a bestseller.

His second book (written with Walter Rabus), The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, was published in Germany by Universitas/, in 1979, and the English translation by de Zayas himself by the University of Nebraska Press in 1989.

The book describes some of the work of the Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle, a special section of the legal department of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, which investigated Allied and German war crimes.

The authors argue that the Bureau carefully investigated war crimes and was largely free of Nazi ideology.

He worked with the United Nations from 1981 to 2003 as a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Chief of Petitions.

In 1994, he co-authored with Prof. Cherif Bassiouni, The Protection of Human Rights in the Administration of Criminal Justice, published by Transnational Publishers.

Since 1996, de Zayas has been married to Carolina Jolanda Edelenbos, a Dutch national and UN official, with whom he had a son, Stefan (deceased).

De Zayas' work focuses inter alia on the judicial protection of peoples and minorities.

The 1999 University of Hertfordshire doctoral dissertation of Robert Bard, Historical Memory of the expulsion of ethnic Germans in Europe 1944–1947, cites de Zayas 58 times and comments approvingly on the historical analysis of Nemesis at Potsdam and A Terrible Revenge.

He observes: "De Zayas' senior position with the UN Human Rights Commission, his position as a United States citizen (not a German) and his indisputable humanitarian credentials meant that de Zayas' work was taken seriously in Germany and America."

Deutsche Welle reported in 2007: "He wrote the first scholarly work on German expellees to appear in English, breaking what had long been a taboo topic."

The German Federal Minister Heinrich Windelen wrote in the foreword to de Zayas's book Anmerkungen zur Vertreibung: "It is thanks to De Zayas that the debate on The Expulsion has been reopened [...] In the subsequent period, a number of authors have drawn on the work of De Zayas. Thus, he has contributed significantly to the fact that discussion of The Expulsion is no longer considered taboo."

According to a doctoral thesis on the historiography of the expulsion, "de Zayas was one of the earliest 'respectable' academics to take up the cause of the expellees... De Zayas does not mention the Holocaust, the Jews, or any other minority ethnic groups that suffered under the Nazis except in passing."

However, Professor Doerr in the Dalhousie Review notes: "De Zayas does not ignore the enormity of the crimes committed by Germans during the course of the war, nor does he deny that an anti-German feeling was natural and that punishment was justified, He does, however, question whether one set of crimes justified a second... whether revenge ... was not only extended to the guilty but to the innocent, whether expulsion itself was a crime ...While critical of western leadership, de Zayas leaves no doubt about the agents of the crime-- the Soviet leaders. ...Praised must be de Zayas's reopening of this largely neglected aspect of modern German history."