D'Souza: Aryeh Neier was and is a legend, as you know. He is the prince of human rights, and what he’s headed and set up—ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] and then Human Rights Watch, and Open Society —he was extraordinary. Aryeh is a very commanding presence. When I met him, at my first board meeting of Article 19 of which he was a founder trustee, when I’d been appointed but hadn’t yet taken over the directorship, I remember him coming up to me and saying, “I don’t know whether to congratulate you or to commiserate,” because Article 19 at that time was in a pretty parlous state. I mean, there were problems. And then it became obvious that he was our champion. 

I remember doing a tour in America to meet various donors and persuade them to continue funding us, and they did. Every time I went to America, I met with Aryeh, and he did an awful lot behind the scenes on Article 19’s behalf. We started producing, in my first few months there, short, sharp reports on free speech issues, either country or theme -based; for example, one on censorship and famine; “Starving in Silence showing the role of censorship in the development of famines we did a series of ever more ambitious projects, including the definitive book on Slobodan Milosovic’s role in using propaganda to pursue the Balkan war.

From Oral History Interview with Frances D'Souza.

LaMarche: When I came to Open Society, I had the concern that the other people and the rest of the global network wouldn’t think this work was very important—that they thought the United States didn’t really need our help, and why were they doing this US thing? That concern didn’t really materialize, and if it ever did, it certainly evaporated over time. I never felt that, even though we came to occupy in short order the biggest slice of the pie of the resources. So Aryeh, I said to him, “What’s my budget going to be?” I’d never been a grant maker before. I got to hire an assistant, and it was just her and me and a couple of projects that were ongoing that I inherited. I had no budget or any promise of a budget.

First thing I did was take everything I could learn about what had been talked about and turned it into a white paper manifesto that Soros and the board would sign off on that I could use as the basis to build the programs, which I did. Then we started to hire people right and left, and so literally it’s the case that I started out in May of ’96 with myself and an assistant and a $5 million budget and ended up a year later with a hundred staff people and a budget of over $100 million.

Oral History Interview with Gara LaMarche.

Mutasah: I think the third phase that I saw in the evolution of OSF was when there was now, I think, a sense of, this is an organization, this is a world institution. But as you look at its future, what are some of the ways in which it should reimagine itself, in order to capture mandates that are more contemporary, and that are responsive to the reality of the world as it is evolving? So, while once upon a time, in that first phase, it had been entrepreneurial, specific responses in engagement to the evolving situation in Central and Eastern Europe in the former Soviet Union, very contingent realities in terms of a changing world in that context, where you could say, “Ah, we are sending in photocopiers to support scientists in Russia,” and so on. But here was a recognition now that open society, as an ethos, could be seen as an ongoing struggle against monopolization of power, against repression, against organized forms of suppression of human rights from states, from nonstate actors, and so on, the role of corporates, the role of international institutions and international organizations. A more complete strategic view, as it were, of the world and the way open society challenges played out in the world and therefore the way you needed to reconceptualize and reimagine an organization, such as OSF, to make sure that it was supporting all those that are engaged, as it were, in this ongoing struggle for open society.

And in this phase, I think, Aryeh’s contribution and his own evolution in relation to that was really the most obvious fit, if you will. Because here was a strategic thinker, here was a public intellectual who had contributed in the public domain, thinking right from questions of surveillance and so on, in his early writings, brought to where he is thinking about questions of free speech versus hate speech, in for instance, his take on the Skokie [National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie] incident, in Defending My Enemy [: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom], right through to at that point, he has just published Taking Liberties [: Four Decades in the Struggle for Rights], which was a sort of magisterial take, as it were, at that point of his life and work, and which kind of represented the many ways in which he was thinking about the world. And at that point, he is preparing his manuscript on what was later to come out in 2012. By 2012, yes, I think revised in 2020, which was the history, the sort of magisterial history of the Human Rights Movement.

So, this suited so well, so perfectly, with the idea of conceptualizing the role of Open Society Foundations in a changing world

From Oral History Interview with Tawanda Mutasah.

Goldston: So we had a number of meetings that discussed what The Justice Initiative would do, and the first chair of our board was Patricia Wald, the former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who had also served as a judge on the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, who had been just a pathbreaking attorney, judge, thinker, rights actor throughout her career. And was also just a gem of human being.  So she did not know what she was getting into at all. And so she and I flew over—after these initial discussions for several months, we went over to Budapest where the then Open Society board was convening. George was chairing the board, and we were going to present the idea of creating this Open Society Justice Initiative.

So Pat and I waited outside the boardroom to be called in, and after sometime we were brought in—big oval table, lots of people sitting around. Pat had prepared what her opening comments were going to be, and then I was going to have my opening comments. So immediately George says to Aryeh—when Aryeh introduces us, George says, “Aryeh, what do we need a new institution for? If I need to know—have an answer on a legal problem, I can call up person X and I can ask them or who to contact. What do we need an institution for?” And Aryeh explained from his point of view why he felt it was important to go beyond just a group of individuals to actually an institution that had an institutional capacity to act in a proactive manner. This discussion went on, back and forth between Aryeh and George maybe for a half hour. Pat was looking at me like, “What are we doing here?”

In the end, the board decided to create The Justice Initiative, and we started embarking on projects, and they included I think what one would call traditionally law reform in the sense that we would work with governments or civil society actors to create institutions, to experiment with pilot projects like on—just to give a couple examples of those, we created a pilot system in Nigeria that took graduates of law study at university and placed them in close cooperation with the bar association in police stations because one of the problems was that people who would be arrested for reasons that—there were many diverse reasons—got caught up in this web of the criminal justice system, and once in, they couldn’t get out. So the law students were there with some training to divert people at the very first instance so that they didn’t get caught in the web if they didn’t need to be there. That was the theory. That got taken over after some time, it got replicated in a number of places.

From Oral History Interview with James Goldston.

Mutasah: So within that context, I think, two examples that I would site of channeling Aryeh and George simultaneously: one was if you took the work that was then coming up in the Open Society Justice Initiative, which was one of the programs, and the amazing leadership of [James A.] Jim Goldston as a leader in that program. So there was a clear sort of Aryeh and I and type dimension of working, of course, the very idea of a justice initiative, and the emphasis on justice, the emphasis on using litigation into the rule of law kind of programming, in seeking to open societies and to sustain societies as open; an emphasis on human rights, including some of the work that we were supporting and doing with Open Society Justice Initiative, of our lawyers, in places where public interest lawyering was relatively underdeveloped, and sort of developing the talent of young lawyers that could be significant actors in, for instance, human rights litigation and constitutional litigation, et cetera, et cetera. So there was all that, and it was easy and rewarding and fascinating to hear, for instance, the conversation between a Jim Goldston, myself, and an Aryeh on those sorts of issues around public interest litigation, around justice, around the sort of human rights dimensions that Open Society Justice Initiative was clearly on top of, so on the one hand.