Jemera Rone | Rights researcher, 71

Jemera Rone, 71, a lawyer who spent years in El Salvador and Sudan documenting human-rights abuses, died July 29 in Washington. Ms. Rone, who graduated from Barnard College and Rutgers Law School, was a corporate takeover litigator from 1977 to 1985. But she also had a progressive streak that included an early stint as a women's rights lawyer and a career-changing trip to El Salvador in 1984 with the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

She spent the next two decades reporting abroad for Human Rights Watch, the agency that expanded from Americas Watch, and became a specialist in the tumult of eastern Africa. She retired in 2006 after a debilitating car accident.

By all accounts, Ms. Rone made her deepest mark in Sudan, where she built a reputation as a dogged researcher who reported on abuses by rebel and government forces in a murky conflict where power switched hands.

Although passion drove her, friends said, Ms. Rone's enduring legacy was to bring lawyerly, dispassionate expertise to issues where truth was often overshadowed by moral outrage and ideological fervor. - Washington Post