After leading a delegation of human-rights leaders to the violence-ridden Balkans in 1993, he said, "It is a bitter, disillusioning and dispiriting experience to see that people can treat each other with such brutality as we approach the 21st century.
"The human-rights movement is like Sisyphus," he said at the time, referring to the figure in Greek mythology condemned to push a rock up a mountain only to have it repeatedly roll back down.
But after recording the horrors committed by all sides in the Balkans, he said it was important to have faith that things will improve.
"The alternative to having faith is despair," he said.
He decried those who remained silent in the face of atrocities.
"It is only a short step from silence to complicity," he said on another occasion.
Jerome Shestack was a retired partner in the law firm of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis. For a time, he was associated with the firm of Wolf Block.
The National Law Journal ranked him as one of the "100 most influential lawyers" in the United States.
Shestack was active in Democratic politics and was a member of the Democratic Party's platform committee at the national convention in San Francisco in 1984.
He was an important influence on Democratic politics through the years and was a mentor to a number of candidates for public office in Philadelphia.
Shestack was president of the American Bar Association from 1997 to 1998, and chaired the ABA's Center for Human Rights. He was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to be the U.S. representative to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 1979, a post he held until 1980.
