American jurist Thomas Buergenthal, an Auschwitz survivor who was a judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, has died at the age of 89, the court said Tuesday.
“It is with great sadness that the ICJ announces the death of Thomas Buergenthal, who was a member of the tribunal from 2000 to 2010, on Monday, May 29 in the United States,” the Court said on Twitter.
Buergenthal was born on May 11, 1934 in the town of Lubochna, in the extinct Czechoslovakia, and after the Nazi invasion he fled with his family to Poland.
After spending two years in the ghettos, he was deported to Auschwitz and was one of the surviving children of this extermination camp.
Later he was taken to Sachsenhausen, in Germany.
Buergenthal was reunited with his mother after the end of World War II and they spent several years in Germany before emigrating to the United States in the 1950s where he studied law.
He specialized in International Law and was a member of the Truth Commission in El Salvador between 1992 and 1993.
Later, this specialist in human rights joined the ICJ in The Hague, where he practiced for a decade in this court, which is a UN judicial body whose mission is to settle legal disputes between States.
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