Allan Gerson
Lawyer who acted for families of victims of the Lockerbie attack
ALLAN GERSON, who has died aged 74, was a lawyer and scholar who represented families of the victims of the Lockerbie disaster, pursued Nazi war criminals, and was a pioneer of the practice of suing foreign governments in US courts for complicity in terrorism.
He was born Elik Gerson on June 19 1945 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, which was then part of the USSR, after his Jewish parents had fled Poland during the Holocaust. His father kept the books in the family sweet shop, while his mother was a dressmaker.
At the end of the Second World War the family, who had spent time in a Siberian labour camp, moved to the US using false papers. They lived incognito in the country, Gerson recalled, until his teens, when a “sympathetic judge” granted the family citizenship. “That is why I identify with the dreamers of today,” he said.
He graduated in Economics from the University of Buffalo in 1966, then in Law from New York University three years later. He went on to gain a Masters at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a doctorate from Yale.
He joined the US Justice Department as a trial lawyer, then moved to the Office of Special Investigations, where he helped hunt Nazi war criminals, many of whom were eventually deported from the US.
In 1981 he became senior counsel to Senator Jeane Kirkpatrick, US Ambassador to the United Nations, and did the same job for her successor, Vernon Walters.
Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988 on its way to London from New York after a bomb was allegedly placed in the hold by a Libyan operative. All 259 passengers and crew, as well as 11 people on the ground, perished.
In 1992 Gerson wrote an article in the New York Times calling on the UN to set up a commission to compensate victims’ families using Libyan assets. Bruce Smith, a former Pan Am pilot and father of one of the victims, retained Gerson in an attempt to bring that about.
The plan never reached fruition – “If we’d known all the difficulties at the outset we probably never would have proceeded,” Smith said later – but Gerson’s efforts did result in the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
The act overturned sovereign immunity and allowed lawsuits against countries the US State Department regarded as sponsors of terrorism – including Libya, with whom a $2.7 billion settlement was agreed over Lockerbie.
President Obama’s veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which made further exemptions to sovereign immunity, was overturned by Congress, enabling the families of victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for its alleged role in the atrocities. Gerson was part of a team acting for many of the families, and the case was still going through the courts when he died.
Among other high-profile cases he took on was that of Pierre Konowaloff, who had claimed that The Night Cafe by Van Gogh had been seized from his family during the Russian Revolution. The case was lost, however, and the US Supreme Court declined to hear it.
Gerson was also later a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations, and wrote or co-wrote books that included The Kirkpatrick Mission: Diplomacy Without Apology; Israel, the West Bank and International Law; and Privatizing Peace: From Conflict to Security.
In 1974 he married the journalist and cooking writer, Joan Nathan; they had three children.
Allan Gerson, born June 19 1945, died December 1 2019