About Peter Weiss
President Emeritus, Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy

Peter Weiss is Co-President of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms; member of the Board of Advisers of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights in Berlin; former Vice President of the Center for Constitutional Rights; and a former Vice President of the International Federation of Human Rights in Paris.

Mr. Weiss is a graduate of Yale Law School and has lectured and written widely on the international law of war and peace, nuclear weapons and human rights. He was the principal author of the draft brief on the illegality of threat or use of nuclear weapons used by many countries in making written submissions to the International Court of Justice in the 1996 nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and served as counsel to Malaysia at the hearings. His most recent article on law and nuclear weapons is "A Legal Path to a Nuclear Weapons Free World" in the Austrian Review of International and European Law (2010). Mr. Weiss is also a leading human rights lawyer, and with the Center for Constitutional Rights litigated the seminal case establishing the right of victims of torture to sue their torturers in US courts (Filartiga v. Peña-Irala). He retired in 1996 from Weiss Dawid Fross Zelnick & Lehrman, a leading trademark firm, and retired in 2006 as Senior Intellectual Property Counsel for Chanel. He is a founder and former President of the American Committee on Africa and former Chairman of the Board of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. He has also long been an activist for peace and justice in the Middle East and is a member of the Executive Committee of Americans for Peace Now.