Ellen L. Lutz

1955 - 2010
Ellen L. Lutz, an international human rights lawyer, teacher, and activist, died on November 4 at her home in Cambridge, MA, after a prolonged fight with metastatic breast cancer. She was 55.

During her final two years battling the disease, she directed the Cambridge-based human rights organization Cultural Survival, co-edited two pioneering books (Prosecuting Heads of State and Human Rights and Conflict Management in Context), submitted reports on indigenous rights to the UN Human Rights Council, led international litigation on behalf of Panama's threatened Ngöbe Indians, and sang alto with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus, each with equal enthusiasm and skill.

Her concern for human rights began when, as a 15-year-old exchange student to Uruguay, where she witnessed the onset of the "Dirty War." Graduating summa cum laude from Temple University (1976), she then obtained a master's degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr (1978). After working for Amnesty International in Washington DC and San Francisco, she earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985.

As Human Rights Watch's first California office director (1989-94), Ellen worked to expose widespread but little-known human rights abuses in Mexico, and was co-counsel in two groundbreaking cases, against Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Argentine General Suarez-Mason.

Moving with her family to Westborough, Massachusetts in 1994, she became the first executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and, in 1997, co-founded the Westborough Community Land Trust. She taught international law and human rights at Tufts, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts, and wrote widely. An ex-student, now a professor, recalled how "warm and desirous she was of connecting to students in an often cold institutional world…"

Ellen became executive director of Cultural Survival in 2004, where she increased the participation of indigenous people, while steering the organization away from small development projects to broad human rights initiatives. "Our work," she said, "is to make sure governments live up to their obligations."

One of her colleagues wrote, "It would be difficult to quantify Ellen's passion for justice. Her zeal and natural warm-heartedness combined with a legal rigor that made her a truly formidable advocate." A friend and Nepalese tribal leader wrote,

In Buddhism Kalyana means Wellbeing and Mitra means friend. Kalyana Mitra therefore means friends who think about their mutual wellbeing. You have been such a friend, a support during my people's political problems in Nepal and one who can also talk about our families, our children, and life. We believe that if persons accumulate good Karma, they meet with a wonderful person, and you are that for me...

Ellen is survived by her husband Theodore Macdonald, an anthropologist previously with Cultural Survival and now with Harvard University, and her two children from a previous marriage, David Randall, now studying at the University of Massachusetts, and Julia Randall, doing research at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Ellen's cat, Misty, and dog, Churi, are well taken care of. All are thankful to their Kalyana Mitra.