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OBITUARIES

Arthur C. Helton '71: Refugee Rights Attorney, Activist

Arthur C. Helton '71

Arthur C. Helton ’71, an attorney and human rights activist who devoted his professional life to assisting and protecting refugees seeking asylum in America and abroad, was killed in the August 19 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. A New York City resident, he was 54.

Helton was the director of peace and conflict studies and a highly esteemed senior fellow for refugee studies and preventive action at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank. An adjunct professor of immigration law at the Law School since 2001, Helton also served as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Law School from 1986–99, teaching courses on migration and forced displacement. From 1997–2000, he was a visiting professor at Central European University, Budapest, as part of the international relations and European studies program.

Arthur Cleveland Helton was born in St. Louis on January 24, 1949. He graduated from NYU Law School in 1976 and began working with refugees in 1982 when he joined the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights in New York to lead its Refugee Rights Program, devoted to helping win asylum in the United States for those fleeing political and religious persecution. He was there until 1994, when he founded, and directed until 1999, the Forced Migration Projects at the Open Society Institute. He became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1999.

Helton’s commitment to helping refugees win asylum in the United States earned him immediate successes in the field, the first being the creation of an innovative and now much-replicated program under which lawyers at the most prestigious firms in the United States, working pro bono, are connected with refugees seeking asylum. Helton used his new program to convince a federal judge that he could provide volunteer lawyers for each of the 2,000 Haitian fugitives held in detention in Florida in order to secure their release. This program now represents more than 1,000 asylum seekers each year and wins more than 90 percent of its cases.

Helton was one of the first activists to include refugee rights and protection as a major focus of human rights. Starting in the early ’80s, he put himself at the center of virtually every legislative and regulatory battle involving refugees. Throughout his life, he was constantly involved in Washington, D.C., and Geneva, shaping policy regarding refugees. He often testified as an international expert in U.S. courts, Congress and the United Nations on migrants’ rights and the protection of refugees. Helton toured disaster areas to study and help refugees and other displaced people and led delegations to study the plight of displaced people in Central America and other refugee issues in Southeast Asia, Africa, Russia and the Middle East. In August, he was in Baghdad to assess humanitarian conditions in Iraq for a series of articles he was planning to write for openDemocracy, an online news agency, according to CFR. At the time of his death, Helton was seeking support and funding for an independent policy center to enhance the effectiveness of international humanitarian action.

Helton wrote more than 80 scholarly articles and contributed to several books on refugees and the displaced. His book, The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century (Oxford University Press) was published last year, winning praise for its analysis, solutions and responses to the refugee policy in the 1990s.

In 2001, Helton was awarded the Immigration and Refugee Policy Award from the Center of Migration Studies. He also received the 2002 Award for Distinction in International Law and Affairs of the New York State Bar Association; the 1991 Ninoy Aquino Refugee Recognition Award, conferred by the president of the Philippines; and the 1987 Public Interest Award conferred by NYU’s Law Alumni Association.

“Arthur was legendarily hard-working and tenacious,” said Michael Posner, LCHR executive director. ”He was not afraid to have an audacious idea, and he was not afraid to carry it out, which he did successfully. … I can remember many times when people, everyone it seemed, would tell Arthur he couldn’t do something, and then, with his singular grit and determination, he would make it happen.”

Helton is survived by his wife of 21 years, Jacqueline D. Gilbert; mother, Marjorie; and sister, Pamela H. Krause.

L.P., M.V.

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