FORA.tv Speaker - William Zabel

William Zabel is chairman of Human Rights First (formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), a nonprofit international human rights organization. He has traveled the globe on Human Rights First's behalf, including a 1986 trip to Chile, where he investigated cases involving those who were disappeared under the Pinochet regime. Zabel was a strong advocate for the creation of the International Criminal Court, and he helped support its growth as an effective forum for bringing human rights violators to justice. Zabel also played a key role in the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, in which the Court declared Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional, effectively putting an end to race-based bans on marriage. Two years later, he was the lead lawyer in Weiss v. Gardner, where the Supreme Court held that a loyalty oath then required by Medicare was unconstitutional. Later, he signed the brief in Palmore v. Sidoti, in which the Supreme Court held that a white woman could not be stripped of custody of her child because she married an African American.