Holocaust survivor who shaped global rights law dies at 89

Thomas Buergenthal, an international law jurist and human rights defender who witnessed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps as a boy, and oversaw cases that included restoring assets to Holocaust survivors and probing atrocities in Central America by U.S.backed governments, died May 29 at his home in Miami. He was 89.

His son, Alan Buergenthal, confirmed the death but no cause was given.

Over more than four decades, Dr. Buergenthal had a major role in establishing the framework of international jurisprudence, building off U.N. declarations since the 1960s often called the “International Bill of Human Rights.” In 1992, the United States ratified the core document, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

But Dr. Buergenthal, who emigrated to the United States in 1951, also confronted the paradox that his adopted country — along with some others — refused to recognize the full legal authority of many of the panels he served, including the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, based at The Hague. The United States has long asserted that international tribunals could put Americans, including U.S. troops, in legal peril and put U.S. sovereignty in question.

Dr. Buergenthal countered that the United States betrayed its own principles with an “almost messianic and fanatical opposition” to U.N.-backed institutions such as the International Criminal Court.

A telephone chat in early 1979 changed the course of Dr. Buergenthal’s career. He was teaching at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. His lectures included analyses of the newly created Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

One afternoon, a call came from the Costa Rican ambassador to the United States, offering a spot on the court. At first Dr. Buergenthal thought it was a prank by one of his students. He called the Costa Rica Embassy, expecting to be laughed at. “A few months later,” he said, “I was elected to the court.”

Some of the first cases before the court involved allegations of rights abuses by U.S.-allied governments in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras against leftist guerrillas and their supporters. Dr. Buergenthal called the cases “landmark events” in helping establish legal precedents in international justice. In 1993, Dr. Buergenthal was part of a U.N. commission that found Salvadoran military officers responsible for so-called “dirty war” crimes, including the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and the killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989.

In his memoir “A Lucky Child” (2007), Dr. Buergenthal said his boyhood struggle to survive during the Holocaust was always infused in his work as a human rights advocate.

“If only because I understood, not only intellectually but also emotionally,” he wrote, “what it is like to be a victim of human rights violations.”

Thomas Buergenthal was born May 11, 1934, in Lubochna, Czechoslovakia (now part of Slovakia), where his family settled after fleeing Germany as the Nazis gained power. His father was trained as a lawyer and worked in banking in Germany. In Lubochna, his parents ran a hotel.

When Germany began seizing parts of Czechoslovakia, the family escaped to Poland in hopes of reaching Britain. War blocked their exit. They were rounded up and eventually shipped to the Birkenau concentration camp, next to Auschwitz, in August 1944.

Dr. Buergenthal and thousands of other prisoners were put on a forced march to another camp, Sachsenhausen, more than 350 miles away. The Red Army liberated the cam p on April 22, 1945.

Dr. Buergenthal was sent to an orphanage in Poland. A re markable stroke of good fortune — a clerk who noticed a telegram from the boy’s mother — led to their reunion in her hometown of Gottingen, Germany. She had ended up at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, when it was freed by Soviet forces. At 17, he left Europe for New Jersey, where he stayed with relatives.

“I saw the fact that I survived as a victory that we had won over them,” he told the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2001.