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Sandra Coliver's career as a human-rights attorney has taken her to Washington, London, and Bosnia, but the 1981 Boalt grad's return to California last year has helped write a new chapter in human-rights history. Coliver heads the San Francisco–based Center for Justice and Accountability, which recently won a significant victory when a Florida jury ordered two former Salvadoran generals to pay $55 million to three plaintiffs tortured in the 1980s by the generals' troops. "I cried out of joy and relief," said Coliver, recalling her response to the verdict, which marked the first time a U.S. jury had ruled against former commanders who appeared in court to deny responsibility for their troops' actions. The decision was celebrated by thousands of Salvadorans. Coliver's interest in human rights began early, before she even set foot on the Berkeley campus, with inspiration from her mother. Edith Simon Coliver '43 was a refugee from Nazi Germany who was living at I-House when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. "What am I doing studying French literature of the 16th and 17th centuries when the world is blowing up?" she asked herself, and decided to pursue a career in international relations. Edith Coliver would eventually play important roles in several key world events of the last century--she was an interpreter in 1945 for the newly founded United Nations, she was an Asia Foundation official during the fall of the Marcos regime, and she was involved with several nonprofits focused on bringing peace to the Middle East. But, even after her death last year, one role continues to stand out for its stark poetic justice: After watching, as an 11-year-old girl, some of the first Jews being carried off to concentration camps and later losing many of her closest friends to the Holocaust, Edith returned to her homeland at the age of 23 to interpret for the war-crimes trials at Nuremberg, where several of Hitler's top deputies were sentenced to death. On an international scale, Nuremberg defined human-rights law, introducing the world to terms such as "genocide" and "war crimes." On a personal level, it made a deep impression on a young Sandra and influenced many of her later decisions, including the one to address a second European genocide as a human rights expert in Bosnia in the late 1990s. "In mom’s stories about Nuremberg," she recalls, "there were two things that struck me. One was the importance of justice, the other was the importance of recognizing when history is happening." As Nuremberg did for Jews, the Florida verdict signifies both justice and historical recognition for many Salvadorans. It also opens legal doors to judgments against other human-rights violators residing in the United States. The Center for Justice and Accountability has brought cases against offenders from Chile, Bosnia, China, and East Timor. "We’re trying to send the message that the United States is not a safe haven for war criminals and human-rights abusers," said Coliver. "This carries forward the principles of Nuremberg." --Pamela Burdman, MBA/MA '92
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