Arthur Cleveland Helton, 54, reportedly died instantly in the attack on the U.N. building. Helton was in the vicinity of the headquarters to meet with Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s chief envoy to Iraq, to assess humanitarian concerns in post-war Iraq. De Mello was also killed in the bombing.

Helton, CC '71, had served as an adjunct lecturer at the law school since 2001, teaching classes primarily on immigration law and policy. Helton maintained a home in New York with his wife, while traveling frequently to Washington, D.C. and Geneva, Switzerland to discuss human rights policies and testify before Congress and the U.N. He also served as the director of peace and conflict studies for the Council on Foreign Relations and as a senior fellow for refugee studies and preventive action.

After earning a law degree from New York University in 1982, Helton began working with refugees. He took a position at the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights and soon created the committee's Refugee Rights Program, which helps those fleeing from political and religious persecution win asylum in the United States. Helton recruited attorneys from major U.S. firms to provide pro bono assistance to refugees seeking asylum, which has since become the model for similar programs. Today, the Refugee Rights Program assists more than 1,000 individuals and families each year, winning approximately 90 percent of its asylum cases.

Helton is credited with shaping much of the United States' policy regarding political refugees. During the 1980s, he worked as the country's leading advocate for immigrant rights, a role which included successfully negotiating for the release of 2,000 Haitian refugees being detained in Florida. Helton, along with other attorneys for the LCHR, promised a federal judge that he would find lawyers for each of the 2,000 individuals. Within several months, Helton had recruited enough attorneys, trained each of them, and connected them with refugees. Through this and other efforts, Helton created a base of U.S. lawyers knowledgeable about refugee issues and policy.

"People now talk about how refugee rights are human rights," said Michael Posner, the executive director of the LCHR. "Arthur was in the forefront of promoting that idea. He was a major force in building concern for refugees first in the U.S. and then he took that concern international."

Helton also authored and collaborated on several books about refugee issues. His most widely-known book, entitled The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century, was published in 2002 and earned accolades from policy makers around the globe, including U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who said publicly that the book would "help us to manage humanitarian challenges better in the future."

Helton is survived by his wife, Jacqueline Gilbert, his mother, who resides in Florida, and his sister, Pamela Krause, who works for the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C.