Judge Buergenthal championed the cause of humanization of international law and human rights education at the early level to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity. Here is his 2008 interview in which he discusses the creativity of international courts, the value of provisional measures, the backlog of human rights cases at the regional courts, the complexity of humanitarian intervention, the need to regulate multinational corporations and NGOs in relation to human rights, the role of truth commissions as a complement to criminal courts, and the need for “shame campaigns” to underscore children’s rights. He declares that the world would have benefited from a truth commission for Germany after WWII in order to understand why Hitler came to power; given the current war in Ukraine, his reflections remain timely.

He was my professor of human rights law at GW and it was an honor to have been his student. He assigned the crisis situation of refugees arriving from Haiti as the exam question. He inspired me to challenge my students to analyze contemporary dilemmas and to recognize the need for shared empathy across borders.