ECCHR commemorates Peter and Cora Weiss 1925/1934 – 2025
by Wolfgang Kaleck and Claire Tixeire
Legendary. Trailblazing. Visionary. These words so often used to describe Peter and Cora Weiss are no exaggerations. They were extraordinary. And extraordinarily loving, too. Together, they confronted apartheid, war, colonialism, dictatorship, nuclear weapons and corporate abuse.
On 3 November 2025, in New York, Peter passed away. He was 99. Five weeks later, on what would have been his 100th birthday, his life partner of 69 years, Cora, died as well. Building on each other’s political commitment, they helped to shape movements and institutions, inspiring generations of lawyers and activists in the United States and around the world.
Working closely with Peter over the last two decades—in his longstanding roles as a board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and of ECCHR—enjoying his dry sense of humor, and cherishing him and Cora as dear friends has been a life mentorship, a true joy and an honor for both authors.
Born in Vienna in 1925, Peter fled Nazi persecution as a teenager and went to the United States as a refugee. After World War II, he worked to dismantle German Nazi-aligned industrial businesses and contributed to preparations for the Nuremberg Trials. These experiences spurred his insistence that power—state or corporate—must be held accountable. As he later put it, “[y]ou don’t make any progress in the world unless the truth gets out.”
For nearly 50 years at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, Peter helped build a new approach to human rights law. He rejected the idea that movements should conform their demands to the limits of existing law, arguing instead that law must be reshaped to serve justice.
When courts failed to confront US crimes—from Vietnam to the Bush administration’s torture program in the so-called “war on terror”— Peter urged movements to look beyond national borders, insisting that “today’s dissents are tomorrow’s majorities.”
Peter and the late Michael Ratner played a crucial role in the founding of ECCHR. Between 2004–2007, they retained ECCHR’s founding director, Wolfgang Kaleck, as their lawyer in cases brought in Germany and Europe against Donald Rumsfeld and other highranking members of the Bush administration, the military and the secret service concerning torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. These experiences, together with the model of professional litigation organizations such as the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), inspired the establishment of a European human rights litigation NGO. The principle of universal juris diction was central to Weiss’s vision—alongside the abolition of nuclear weapons, a cause for which he advocated throughout his life.
Cora Weiss was also central to the movements of her time. A feminist and peace activist, she played a leading role in Women Strike for Peace and in mass mobilizations against the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons. She helped organize some of the largest demonstrations of the era, including the 1982 antinuclear rally in Central Park that drew nearly a million people. Cora believed deeply in civil society and in the power of people to organize, persevere and change history. Later, as the President of the Hague Appeal for Peace, she became a leading advocate for peace education for lasting change. “I have a friend who likes to needle me by saying ‘law is the dead hand of the past laid upon the present,’” Peter once told a group of law students, “to which I usually reply, ‘law is the burning vision of the future leading us onward.’ Of course, we are both wrong. But I still prefer my version.” They will be missed, but their legacy lives on.
