Jerome Shestack

Laureate Profile

Jerome J. Shestack, former president of the American Bar Association, established a Working Group at the UN Commission on Human Rights that helped end the practice of disappearances in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. He has helped end institutionalized race and gender discrimination in the US and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and elsewhere. Through the International Criminal Court (which he helped create) and the International League for Human Rights (which he chaired), Shestack mobilized world opinion against injustice and human rights abuses on several continents. He successfully defended dissidents in the former Soviet Union and South Africa. A former member of the Executive Council of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, he helped marshal protests against the genocide in Sudan. He has served as a mentor to a generation of human rights lawyers.