On October 5, 1916, Greta Tugendhat was born in Brünn, Moravia, now Brno in the Czech Republic. A different woman, born in a different city in the same era, provides the cleaner illustration of what this period produced.

Hersch Lauterpacht was the famous architect of international human rights law. His wife Rachel Steinberg Lauterpacht — a lawyer who had also studied at Vienna and advised on early UN human rights drafts — appears in the archival record primarily as his wife.

The cleaner case is Cecilia Medina Quiroga, born in Chile in 1935, who became one of the principal architects of the Inter-American human rights system, served as president of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and as a member and chair of the UN Human Rights Committee. She built the procedural infrastructure that allowed individuals to bring human rights cases before international bodies — a change that made international law accessible to people who were not states.

She did this work during and after the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, which overthrew the Allende government in September 1973 and ruled by mass detention, torture, and disappearance. Her human rights work was not abstract; it was conducted in close proximity to a state that was violating the norms she was building mechanisms to enforce.

The legal mechanisms she helped construct have been used in thousands of cases. She held academic positions in Chile, the Netherlands, and the United States. She received the Order of the Aztec Eagle from Mexico in 2004.