The trailblazing human rights attorney Peter Weiss has died at the age of 99. Weiss served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for nearly five decades, where he worked to end South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, fought for nuclear disarmament and sought justice for victims of the U.S.-backed Contras in 1980s Nicaragua. He pioneered using the 1789 Alien Tort Statute in human rights cases. He also represented the family of U.S. journalist and human rights activist Charles Horman in a case against Henry Kissinger and others, after Horman was disappeared and killed in Chile soon after the U.S.-backed 1973 coup. He spoke to Democracy Now! about the case in 2013.

Peter Weiss: “Our case was dismissed because we couldn’t conduct discovery. When you bring any kind of case, civil or criminal, you have to look for the evidence and produce the evidence to the judge or the jury. And everything that we wanted, we were told, was classified and would not be made available to us. So, eventually, the case had to be dismissed.”

Peter Weiss died just five weeks shy of what would have been his 100th birthday.