2013 Prize Laureate
Eric Rosenthal
Disability Rights International, Founder + Executive Director
“The Jewish principle from the Torah – ‘Do not oppress the stranger, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ – is very powerful to me. As a people, we care deeply about family and community; and as a people we have a particular responsibility to help ensure that people with disabilities grow up with families; are part of communities; and are not marginalized, dehumanized and put away.”
Eric Rosenthal is Founder and Executive Director of Disability Rights International (DRI), a Washington, D.C.-based organization working globally to end the segregation and abuse of children and adults with disabilities. Since founding DRI in 1993, Rosenthal has brought unprecedented world attention to people with disabilities warehoused in institutions where they face atrocious abuses, conducting investigations in over 36 countries and authoring human rights reports on 16 countries. He helped draft the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and led media campaigns that built global support for its ratification. DRI has brought groundbreaking cases to international human rights bodies, winning cases against Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, and Serbia that established the right for people with disabilities to live in the community, closed abusive institutions, and earned financial reparations for thousands. In a landmark case against the United States, Rosenthal gained recognition that using electric shock as punishment for children with disabilities may constitute torture under international law.
An attorney, law professor, and humanitarian, Rosenthal has trained activists in 40 countries and spun off disability-run advocacy organizations in six countries through DRI's Worldwide Campaign to End the Institutionalization of Children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DRI created a Global Coalition on Deinstitutionalization, and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, DRI was the first organization to bring international attention to children with disabilities impacted by war, garnering extensive coverage including 11 BBC stories and an NBC News profile. His exceptional work has earned him the Charles Bronfman Prize, an Ashoka Fellowship, the Henry B. Betts Award, the American Psychiatric Association's Human Rights Award, and an honorary doctor of laws from Georgetown, where he was appointed to the Father Robert Drinan Chair in International Human Rights Law. He has been profiled by The New York Times Magazine, 20/20, and featured in editorials across major publications.
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