Mieczysław Maneli

Mieczysław Maneli (born Moshe Meir Manela; 22 January 1922 – 9 April 1994) was a Polish lawyer, diplomat and academic best remembered for his work with the International Control Commission (ICC) during the Vietnam War, especially the 1963 "Maneli Affair". During the Holocaust, he survived the Auschwitz death camp, and then became after the war a prominent academic in Poland, serving as the Dean of Law at University of Warsaw.

The term "Maneli affair" is used by historians because the initiative first became known to the public on 18 September 1963 when it was revealed by the American columnist Joseph Alsop that Maneli had twice met Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother and right-hand man of President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam. The name "Maneli Affair", a proposal to end the Vietnam War by creating a federation of the two Vietnams that would be neutral in the Cold War is a misnomer as the proposal was actually a diplomatic initiative made by the French President Charles de Gaulle. Maneli later revealed more about the 1963 peace initiative in his 1971 memoir The War of the Vanished.

After the "March Events" of 1968, he was dismissed from his post as the Dean of Law at the University of Warsaw in July 1968 as part of the "anti-Zionist" campaign, causing him to go into exile in the United States. In his exile in New York, where he taught at Queens College, Maneli was the author of many books, such as Juridical Positivism and Human Rights, Freedom and Democracy and Perelman's New Rhetoric as Philosophy and Methodology for the Next Century dealing with the philosophical basis of a democratic society.