Remembering Peter Weiss

The Institute for Policy Studies staff and board are mourning the loss of Peter Weiss, a path-breaking international human rights lawyer who led the Institute’s board of directors with a steady and courageous hand in the face of Nixon era political harassment and a 1976 international state terrorist attack that left two IPS colleagues dead.  

Peter died on November 3 at age 99. 

“Peter saw the best in us all,” said IPS Senior Advisor and former Director John Cavanagh. “He was a pioneer in lifting up economic, social, and cultural rights as norms that could create a common global language to unite peace and justice advocates across movements and borders.  He understood that unaccountable global corporations were a great threat to those rights, and he helped IPS fight back against all kinds of challenges, with law and creativity on our side.”  

Peter and his wife, Cora, and her father, Samuel Rubin, were early supporters of the Institute for Policy Studies. They shared a passionate commitment to military disarmament with Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin, who co-founded IPS in 1963.  

During the Vietnam War, Peter was an unflinching defender of Barnet and Raskin’s opposition activities, facing IRS audits along with every other IPS board member every year during the Nixon administration. (The weaponization of the IRS to harass political opponents was later banned.) 

Nixon placed Barnet and Raskin on his “enemies list” and court records later revealed that his administration ordered a spying operation that involved infiltrating IPS with more than 70 informants, wiretapping the organization’s phones, and searching through its garbage. 

In response to this harassment at home, Peter became deeply involved with other Institute leaders in the establishment of an IPS sister organization abroad. They chose the Netherlands, a country with a long history of political tolerance, as the site of the Transnational Institute, which opened its doors in 1974 and remains a hub of progressive internationalist research and advocacy. Peter supported the creation of TNI not just as a possible political haven, but also because he felt it would encourage IPS staff to think globally. 

“There’s a big world out there beyond Washington,” he said in this IPS video (minutes 8:51 – 16:12). “And there are plans and solutions for the world’s problems — and not all of them come from Washington.” 

On the morning of September 21, 1976, Peter received a phone call with the news that Orlando Letelier and his IPS colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt had been killed in a terrorist attack in Washington, DC. Letelier and Moffitt had been on their way to work when agents of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet detonated a bomb under Letelier’s car on Massachusetts Avenue. 

Within an hour, Peter and Cora were on a flight to Washington. Orlando was a former Chilean ambassador and cabinet member in the government of democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende. After the 1973 coup that toppled that regime, Orlando was detained and tortured in a political prisoner camp for more than a year. After his release, he accepted a position at IPS and became one of the most prominent critics of the Pinochet dictatorship, while also working closely with Peter to establish TNI. In the face of this unspeakable act of international terrorism, Peter joined other IPS leaders in their defiance. 

“We shall take their filthy bombs — transformed into ideas, organization, and united struggle — and throw them back into their faces,” he declared at Orlando’s funeral mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington on September 26, 1976.

“Throughout his career, Peter worked tirelessly and creatively to throw legal bombs at human rights violators, including U.S. officials who supported the Pinochet dictatorship and other atrocities around the world,” IPS Program Director Sarah Anderson said. 

In one pioneering case, Peter was the lead counsel in Filartiga v. Pena Irala, which established universal jurisdiction in cases involving human rights abuses, regardless of where the crime occurred or the nationality of the victim or perpetrator. Numerous cases built on this landmark precedent, including the Spanish case that led to the ground-shaking arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998. 

While British courts eventually released Pinochet on medical grounds, the Chilean Supreme Court later stripped the former dictator of immunity from prosecution, and at the time of his death in 2006 he faced hundreds of pending criminal charges for human rights violations, tax evasion, and embezzlement.

“Peter’s commitment to peace — shared by Cora through their lifetime of fighting together for justice — never waivered,” said IPS program director Phyllis Bennis. “He was the most careful reader of anything having to do with nuclear weapons. His critique would soon arrive in the inbox of any IPSer who referenced nukes without the requisite call for abolition.”

Phyllis and Sarah visited Peter and Cora at their Manhattan apartment in 2023 in the middle of torrential flooding that had shut down subway stations and roadways across the city. 

“Did you swim here?” Peter quipped when they arrived at his door, sopping wet. Hours later when the rain subsided and Phyllis and Sarah started to leave, Peter was having none of it. 

“I haven’t told you my ideas on how to solve the Ukraine crisis yet. Come back and sit down!” he said. “We always came back — and Peter’s legacy now comes with us,” Phyllis said. 

“In this wretched time of a lawless executive, growing great power rivalry, and complicity in grotesque genocide, we should remember Peter’s central insight: Belief in creating a system of laws and of justice is not naive,” wrote Robert Borosage, who served as IPS Director under Peter’s board leadership in the 1980s. 

“This belief is not the idle fantasy of dreamers. It is essential to survival. In this time of ‘polycrisis’ — inequality, pandemics, climate catastrophe, lawless states, and more — we will have to build a new system of laws and of justice if the powerful are to be held accountable and the many are to thrive, or at least survive. This is Peter’s legacy — and his charge to all of us.”