Aryeh Neier (born 1937) is an American human rights activist who co-founded Human Rights Watch, served as the president of George Soros’s Open Society Institute philanthropy network from 1993 to 2012, had been National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1970-1978, and he was also involved with the creation of the group SDS by being directly involved in the group SLID's renaming.Neier was born in Nazi Germany and became a refugee as a child when his family fled in 1939 when he was two years old.