From surviving the Holocaust to international human rights judge

Luck, Theodor Meron said, has followed him through his life. He says it not as a boast but as a kind of wonder, as though he still cannot quite believe the sequence of contingencies that allowed him to survive when so many others did not. In conversation with Baroness Helena Kennedy, one of Britain’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Judge Meron reflected on his survival from genocide and the fragile but crucial architecture of international justice.  

As a child during the Second World War, Meron was removed from his home in Kalisz, Poland, and forced into a crammed ghetto. On its outskirts, resistance fighters were secretly building tunnels to smuggle weapons and potentially as escape routes. One afternoon, Meron returned late from his menial job, just fifteen minutes behind his usual schedule. By the time he arrived home, the SS had already come and gone. His mother and his grandparents along with other ghetto residents had been shot. Had he arrived a quarter of an hour earlier, he said, he would have been killed along with them. 

“I was lucky,” he said quietly, more than eighty years later, recounting his story before a hushed audience. The word did not begin to capture the devastation. But it did explain, in his telling, the narrowness of the margin that separated life from death. 

Theodor Meron

Meron survived ghettos, camps and unimaginable atrocities, he said, by retreating into constant daydreaming. There were no children to play with, no school to attend. Hunger was a given, fear a daily condition. When the war finally ended, he emerged not only alive but ravenous for education, as if knowledge itself might offer a kind of protection against chaos. After the war, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he was taken in by his aunt and uncle. Though he was already a teenager, he had to return to primary school. He did not resent the humiliation, and instead saw learning as a way forward.  

At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he studied international law and human rights, fields that barely existed in their modern form. From there, he applied to eight American law schools and was rejected by seven. Harvard Law School accepted him. “It was very hard,” he recalled. “The scholarship I got was only $800, which at the time was only enough to pay tuition.” He survived on almost nothing. Then, unexpectedly, an aerogram arrived from the University of Cambridge inviting him to complete his doctorate. 

“I often speak to students about careers,” he said, “and I tell them one of the things we need to try to see is that we should not let opportunities pass us by. These openings will not be there forever. They are ephemeral.” He laughed as he recalled once telling his wife that in his next incarnation he would like to be offered a permanent job at Oxford and never leave. Not long after, he received an offer to teach international criminal law at Trinity College, Cambridge. “So I consider myself a very lucky person,” he said. 

Others might describe the arc of his career differently. Luck, perhaps, opened doors. But it was Meron’s moral clarity and his insistence on the integrity of law that propelled him through them. 

That clarity was on display in 1967, after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. Meron, then a legal adviser at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was asked to provide counsel to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol on the legality of establishing Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. “I wrote the opinion of three pages, and did not spend too much time on it,” Meron recalled. “For me it was an obvious conclusion.” Drawing on the Fourth Geneva Convention, he advised that transferring the occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory was illegal. “I said we need to interpret the law as it is,” he said, “and not in a way to make it more palatable to the people in government.” 

The opinion was shelved. For decades it remained buried in archives until a determined academic unearthed it, revealing that the Israeli government had been warned, at the highest legal levels, that the settlement enterprise violated international law. “That opinion is something that makes me so sad,” Meron said. “I think, ‘Why didn’t the government accept it?’ I believe a great opportunity for peace and reconciliation was lost, and a great opportunity for a two-state solution.” 

Meron went on to serve as Isareli ambassador to Canada, but it was not until later in life that he became a judge, finally putting his legal theories into practice. Appointed by the US State Department to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he felt more fear than triumph. “My reaction to the appointment was intimidation,” he said. “I had never practiced law before, so the last few months before the appointment I read anything I could find on procedure in international criminal justice.” 

Theodor Meron with Baroness Helena Kennedy

At the time, international law did not recognize rape in war zones as a war crime in its own right. Meron challenged that omission in a groundbreaking article, “Rape as a War Crime,” arguing that sexual violence should be prosecuted as a crime against humanity. Until then, the law narrowly defined rape as requiring proof of continuous resistance. “If a woman showed resistance she would have had her throat cut,” he said. The standard ignored the reality of coercion. “We changed the law to say the main element of rape was absence of consent.” 

“I am proud of this,” Meron mused. “It was a step forward in international criminal law because it takes into account the victim’s experience. I am so lucky I was part of this and had an opportunity to write real change.” 

His work would continue to place him at the center of global controversies. In 2024, Meron advised the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on potential arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza. Based on the evidence, he said, there were reasonable grounds to believe that both men had committed crimes against humanity, including starvation and the wilful targeting of civilians. The advice drew fierce criticism and praise in equal measure. For Meron, it was simply an application of law to facts, however uncomfortable the conclusions. 

Towards the end of the discussion one audience member asked a question of how Meron responds to voices calling for the collapse of the current world order and an end to what some described as American hypocrisy. How, he asked, did Meron respond to those who believe the system should fall? 

Meron was neither dismissive nor alarmist. He said he was not pessimistic about the future, but neither was he blind to the crisis. Progress, he argued, is rarely linear. “We have ups and downs,” he said, “and sometimes the worst violations lead to improvements in the law.” He pointed to the American Civil War, which helped produce a code of conduct in war and later influenced the Hague Convention. “Take the Holocaust,” he continued. “It was unprecedented killing on an industrial scale. But it led to the International Declaration of Human Rights and a generation who believed human rights are worth fighting for.” 

Human beings, he said, have an extraordinary capacity to look at their worst actions and try to prevent their recurrence. 

Another audience member asked Meron what advice he could offer to those working in international human rights who fear darker days ahead. Meron did not hesitate. “We must be optimistic,” he said. “We must believe things will become better.” Political leaders come and go, he added. “Trump will not always be president of the United States. There are ups and downs, but trust that humanity will figure things out. We must believe in what we are doing and make it worthwhile.” 

He ended the discussion by describing one of the most controversial times in his career when he reversed convictions of alleged war criminals because he did not find the evidence met the legal standard for war crimes. On appeal, all eight judges reviewed the evidence and unanimously ruled that Meron was correct. For Meron this was proof that international human rights judges are not bowing to political pressure but applying the law. “You have to do the things that are right, and not give a damn about the political consequences,” he mused.  

For someone who attributes his survival to luck, Meron has spent a lifetime refusing to leave justice to chance. 

You can watch the event in full here.