(b. 1947 ) US-American lawyer, writer, and historian, president of the PEN Club in the French part of Switzerland, formerly a senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner For Human Rights , he has written and lectured extensively on human rights subjects ranging from the Armenian Genocide to the US-run prisons at Guantanamo Bay, to the expulsion of Eastern European Germans after the Second World War, to the invasion of Cyprus by Turkey in 1974, to the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights Committee, which he served as Secretary. He is a foremost academic advocate the "the right to the homeland" as a universal human right. He is tresurer of Millennium Solidarity, a Geneva non-governmental organization working for world peace and the eradication of poverty.
Born to a family of Spanish and French descent, de Zayas grew up in Chicago . He earned his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School and a Doctorate Of Philosophy in modern history from the Georg August University Of Göttingen . He practiced corporate law in New York and family law in Florida . He also was a Fulbright Fellow at the University Of Tübingen and research fellow at the Max Planck Institute For Comparative Public Law And International Law in Heidelberg.
During the course of his legal and academic career, he has been a visiting professor of international law and of world history at a number of institutions, including the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva, the DePaul University College Of Law (Chicago), the University Of British Columbia ( Vancouver ), the Geneva School Of Diplomacy And International Relations , the Schiller International University ( Leysin ), the Academie Internationale De Droit Constitutionnel ( Tunis ), the University Of Trier , and the Universitad De Alcala De Henares ( Madrid ).
He is a member of the German Society For International Law and the Centre Against Expulsions (''Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen'') and sits in the advisory boards of several organizations including the Internationale Gesellschaft fuer Menschenrechte in Frankfurt a.M. He served for 15 years as president of the United Nations Society Of Writers (Geneva) and is still editor-in-chief of the UN literary review ''Ex Tempore'' ISSN 1020-6604, which has hitherto published 16 volumes. Since 2006 he has been the secretary-general of the Swiss-French International PEN and is currently its President. He has published poetry in English, French, German and Spanish, and translated Rilke into English, French and Spanish. De Zayas received the "Plakete fuer Verdienste fuer das Selbstbestimmungsrecht" in 1997, the "Humanitas Ring" in 1998, the Walter Eckart Prize for History in 2001, and a Menschenrechtspreis in 2004.
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas is married and resides in Geneva.
- Nemesis at Potsdam: the Expulsion of the Germans from the East. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989. (1st edition published in 1977.) ISBN 0803249101 Updated seventh edition published 2003 by Picton Press in Rockport, Maine. ISBN 0-89725-360-4
- A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. ISBN 1403973083. New revised edition with Palgrave/Macmillan, New York 2006.
- The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945. (With Walter Rabus .) Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1989. ISBN 0803299087. New revised edition with Picton Press, Rockport, Maine, ISBN 0-89725-421-X
- Heimatrecht ist Menschenrecht. Auf dem Weg zu einer Weltkonvention. (''The Right to the Homeland is a Human Right: Towards an International Convention''.) Universitas Verlag, 2001. ISBN 380041416
- "Rainer Maria Rilke. Die Larenopfer" Bilingual English-German edition with commentary. Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2005. ISBN 1-59709-010-7
- "Die Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts" Universitas Verlag, München, 7th revised edition 2001, prior editions with Ullstein Verlag, Berlin.
- "International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms", co-editor and co-author with Gudmundur Alfredsson and Bertram Ramcharan , Kluwer, The Hague, 2001.
- "Human Rights in the Administration of Criminal Justice" in collaboration with Professor Cherif Bassiouni, Transnational Press, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-941320-87-1
- 18 entries in the Encyclopaedia of Public International Law, edited by Rudolf Bernhardt, Elsevier, Amsterdam, Vol. 1-5, 1992-2003, including "United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights", "Combatants", "Spanish Civil War", "Population Expulsion", "Repatriation", "Open Towns", "Curzon Line", "United States Dependent Territories", "European Recovery Program", etc.
- four entries in the Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, edited by Professor Dinah Shelton, Macmillan, 2004, "Aggression", "Ismail Enver", "Nelson Mandela", and "Raoul Wallenberg".
- "The Status of Guantanamo Bay and the Status of the Detainees" in U.B.C. Law Review, Volume 37, Number 2, July 2004, pp. 277-341.
- "Human Rights and Indefinite Detention" in International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 87 pp. 15-38 (2005).
- "Petitioning the United Nations", American Society of International Law, Proceedings of the 95th Annual Meeting, April 4-7 2001, Washington D.C., pp. 82-87.
- "The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights" in Helmut Volger (ed.) Concise Encyclopaedia of the United Nations, Kluwer, The Hague, 2002.
- "The Twentieth Century's First Genocide: International Law, Impunity, the Right to Reparations, and the Ethnic Cleansing against the Armenians" in Steven Vardy and Hunt Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe, Columbia University Press, 2003, pp. 157-180, 255-267, 787-804.
- "The International judicial protection of peoples and minorities", in Catherine Broelmann et al (eds.) Peoples and Minorities in International Law, Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1993 pp. 253/289.
- Le droit constitutionnel et l'internationlasitation des droits de l'homme" Recueil des Cours de l'Academie internationale de droit constitutionnel, vol. XI, 2001, pp. 307-365; "Constitution et protection internationale contre la discrimination", Recueil des Cours, Vol. XIV, 2004, pp. 247-281.
- Foreword to James Bacque, "Crimes and Mercies", Little Brown and Company, London 1997.
- Foreword to Erich Helfert's "Valley of the Shadow", Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley 1997.
- Foreword to Brigitte U. Neary and Holle Schneider-Ricks, "Voices of Loss and Courage", Picton Press, Rockport Maine, 2002.
- Foreword to Eva Krutein "Eva's War" Amador Publishers, Amador Publishers , 1990, trade paperback, 253 pages, ISBN 0938513087. Story of a German refugee from Danzig at the end of World War II.
- Foreword to "Genocide of the Ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia 1944-1948", Munich 2003.
Poetry in English, French, Spanish, German and Russian published in various literary journals. http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/zayas.html. His German poem "Beglückt" was translated into Chinese and published in a literary review in Shanghai, 2003. See http://www.alfreddezayas.com/Poems/Chinespoem.jpg
- http://www.alfreddezayas.com Alfred de Zayas -- His website containing many of his articles, including the Douglas McK Brown lecture at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, on the issue of the Guantanamo Naval Base, 37 U.B.C. Law Review, 277-341 (2004) as well as more than 100 translations of Rainer Maria Rilke into English, French and Spanish.
- http://www.3sat.de/3sat.php?http://www.3sat.de/neunzehn/gast/43622/ Professional biography (in German)
- http://www.genevadiplomacy.com/?menu_id=6&page_id=15&full=1&faculty_id=24
- http://www.armeniaforeignministry.com/conference/speakers.html
- http://www.redhen.org/authorDetail.asp?authorID=85
- http://www.millennium-solidarity.net/committee.html
- http://dip.uah.es/prod02.htm
- http://www.wvu.edu/~lawfac/jelkins/lp-2001/zayas.html
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