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. From 1 May 2012 to 30 April 2018, he served as the first UN Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order, appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council.Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order , Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ohchr.org. Retrieved 14 December 2015.
Early life and education De Zayas was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in Chicago, Illinois (US). He earned his juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School, then a doctorate of philosophy in modern history from the University of Göttingen (Germany).Profile , spiegel.de. Retrieved 15 December 2015.
He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Tübingen in Germany and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany.Alfred de Zayas "A Fulbrighter in Germany" in Arthur Dudden (ed.), The Fulbright Experience, Transaction Books, Oxford, 1987 Rudolf Bernhardt (ed.), Encyclopedia of Public International Law, Preface, Vol. I, p.viii. Elsevier, Amsterdam 1992, , Vol. V, 2003, p 102, . He worked with the United Nations from 1981 to 2003 as a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human RightsA. de Zayas "Human Rights, United Nations High Commissioner for" in H. Volger (ed.) Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations, Kluwer, the Hague, 2002, pp. 217–23, reviewed by Ruth Wedgwood in the American Journal of International Law, vol. 99, pp. 284–87, at 285;A. de Zayas, "United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights" in Rudolf Bernhardt (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Public International Law, Vol. 4, 2000, Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 1129–32 and the Chief of Petitions.
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).Tom Hostage, Fordham University Class of 1967, 50th Reunion Yearbook, Bespoke Press, New York, 2017, p. 70
Scholarly work
De Zayas' work focuses inter alia on the judicial protection of peoples and minorities.Yoram Dinstein, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Volume 23, 1993, p. 416 He has written and lectured extensively on human rights, including the jurisprudence of the United Nations Human Rights Committee,Jakob Th. Möller/Alfred de Zayas, The United Nations Human Rights Committee Case Law 1977-2008, N.P. Engel Publishers, Kehl/Strasbourg, 2009; "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 the Armenian genocide,"El Genocidio contra los Armenios y la relevancia de la Convención para la prevención y la sanción del delito de genocidio" with a Prologue by the International Commission of Jurists, Buenos Aires, 2009; The_genocide_against_the_Armenians_1915 the Holocaust, the US-run detention centers at Guantanamo Bay,"Wem gehört Guantanamo Bay", Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 December 2003Interview with former Guantanamo inmate, Al-Jazeera journalist Sami Elhaj: We had no rights, we were not treated as human beings, in Current Concerns, No. 7, page 5 (2008) ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia,"Ethnische Säuberungen und das Internationale Kriegsverbrechertribunal für das ehemalige Jugoslawien" in Archiv des Völkerrechts, Band 35 (1997) pp. 29–72, "Der Krieg im ehemaligen Jugoslawien aus völkerrechtlicher Sicht" in Tilman Zülch (ed.) Ethnische Säuberung, Luchterhand Verlag, 1999 the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in 1974,"Self-determination. Turkish settlers and Cyprus referenda" in Andreas Auer (ed.) A Constitutional Convention for Cyprus, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2009; "Turkey must apologise" Cyprus Weekly, 25 February 2011, p. 14 the rights of minorities,"Minority Rights in the New Millennium", The Geneva Post Quarterly, May 2007, pp. 155–208 the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the rights of indigenous peoples.
In 1994, he co-authored with Prof. Cherif Bassiouni, The Protection of Human Rights in the Administration of Criminal Justice, published by Transnational Publishers.
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."
On the 1944–1950 expulsion of Germans 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.Zayas, Alfred-Maurice de: A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the Eastern European Germans 1944–1950, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 De Zayas was reportedly the first American historian to address this topic. 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."Heinrich Windelen, "Foreword" in A. de Zayas, Anmerkungen zur Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten, Kohlhammer Verlag, 1993; 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."Robert Bard, "Historical Memory of the Expulsion of Ethnic Germans in Europe 1944–1947" , University of Hertfordshire, July 2009. 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."Dalhousie Review, vol. 57, No. 3, Autumn 1977, pp. 582–584. The 1999 University of Hertfordshire doctoral dissertation of Robert Bard, Historical Memory of the expulsion of ethnic Germans in Europe 1944–1947, comments on the historical analysis of Nemesis at Potsdam and A Terrible Revenge: "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."
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.
Nemesis at Potsdam 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.
The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau 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. De Zayas worked with the 226 extant volumes (about half of the total, the rest apparently having been burned in Langensalza, Germany, near the end of the war.Zayas, Alfred-Maurice de, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939–1945, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, 1989, pp. xiii–xiv.). The book was savagely attacked in the media of the Soviet Union and its satellites.Eugeniusz Guz, Trybuna Ludo, 30. VIII. 1980, Nr. 179."Zdumiewajacy obiektywizm Zayasa". Glos Szczecinski, 5. 3. 1980.
In a review of the book in the Cambridge Law Journal, Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge and judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Christopher Greenwood considered the book to be "excellent" and that "the authors deserve the gratitude of all those interested in the laws of war but unable to read German for bringing out an English edition." He goes on to add that "Throughout the book the authors emphasize that all the cases they examined have to be seen against the background of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the German armed forces and SS."