Reflections on two decades of doing and learning about human rights [1]
I was fortunate to be offered the opportunity to write the following article, reflecting on 20+ years of human rights advocacy during my time as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada between 2000-2020, for inclusion in the Third Edition of the Canadian Yearbook on Human Rights, published by the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa. The article was written in June 2021, close to 2 years ago, so is not necessarily current with all more recent developments such as the invasion of Ukraine. It is a retrospective look back.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(1) Reflections
(2) Rights Learnings
(3) Prioritize Rights
(a) Human rights and ‘friendship’
(b) No justice, no peace
(c) Human rights and security: can’t have one without the other
(d) Business and human rights
(4) Embrace all Rights
(a) All rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural
(b) The human rights of Indigenous peoples
(5) Equalize Rights
(a) Women’s human rights and gender equality
(b) Anti-Black racism
(c) Refugees, migrants and the borders of human rights
(d) A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian
(e) Decriminalizing human rights
(6) Implement and Enforce Rights
(a) Global enforcement
(b) Federalism and Canada’s human rights implementation deficit
(7) Claim and Defend Rights
(a) To the streets
(b) The defenders
(8) Believe in Rights
(a) Believing is solidarity
(b) Believing in words on paper
(c) Believing in names
(d) Believing in the future
(i) Believe that we can overcome hate
(ii) Believe that we can save the climate
(iii) Believe that we can curtail technology’s harms
(iv) Believe that we can build back for human rights
(9) Final Words
(1) Reflections
2000-2020; having recently stepped down from serving as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada after 20 years in the role offers a welcome opportunity for some human rights reflection.
Right away, my head and heart are awash in memories that bounce back and forth among elation, despair, triumph and fear. I remember words and moments shared by survivors, human rights defenders, and community leaders across Canada and around the world. Each snippet captures a piece of the spirit of universal human rights.
If not me, who?
But I’ve left my country, I don’t have any more rights.
Everyone cares about the diamonds, no one cares about us.
She will never be forgotten.
We’ve come so far, but there is a long journey still ahead.
We keep going, because we are not alone.
No one thought it was possible, but they did not count on our power.
Follow me while I follow you.
Isn’t Canada supposed to be the land of human rights?
He lived, he mattered, he had a name.
There is no hope, there is only hope.
The settings and circumstances, in many ways could not have been more disparate: from Guantánamo Bay to eastern Chad; Zimbabwe to Mexico; Grassy Narrows First Nation to Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. But each moment underscored how vital it is that we all come together in the universal human rights struggle; a collective responsibility that can never be set aside.
Obviously, though, that is precisely the responsibility that is set aside every day. Set aside by politicians, military and police officials, armed rebels, terrorist groups, business executives, religious leaders and others with the power to uphold and advance human rights, to prevent and redress human rights violations; but also the power to carry out terrible acts of violence, reinforce inequality, fuel racism, and make decisions with devastating impact on the lives and well-being of billions.
Sadly, though, set aside by millions upon millions of people everywhere who were perhaps never convinced or have lost confidence that human rights offer a solution to the hardships they face daily.
Set aside, yes, but over these past twenty years there has at the same time been an unprecedented explosion of people power, claiming and demanding that human rights be embraced. We see that in the tenacious advocacy of frontline human rights defenders, the courage of determined youth defying police and military repression, or the mobilization of millions, increasingly led by women, who have poured into streets and public squares, daring to dream of a brighter future.
Despair and hope. Determination and repression. As I sit down in mid-2021 to share these reflections it is abundantly clear that in many ways the world has never before been so urgently pulled in opposite directions when it comes to respecting and upholding human rights. Our challenge is to pull harder than ever in the direction promised 73 years ago when governments committed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quite simply that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Having taken up the Amnesty Canada Secretary General role on January 1, 2000, these past 20 years began with an impending sense of doom that the new millennium would launch with the so-called Y2K Bug, an anticipated information technology catastrophe which was feared might provoke economic and societal collapse. (It fortunately did not.) I have recently stepped down from the role, though, amidst a global crisis that has proven to be very real, the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on life, health and livelihoods for billions of people around the world.
The two situations – a crisis entirely averted and a crisis of unprecedented scale that has been truly harrowing – could not be more different; except for the way that they uniquely brought the whole world together in shared focus and concern. That sense of worldwide connection is, unfortunately, otherwise often so very difficult to muster in the face of so many urgent realities that are wide sweeping in their global impact.
I am struck as well that these twenty years, more or less, were bookended by the Bush and Trump presidencies in the United States. I say so not to make a comparison between the two men or the administrations over which they presided; but rather that the combined twelve years of their times in office were marked by an assault, both direct and insidious, on the very foundations of universal human rights. Those years are a reminder that nothing can be taken for granted, there is no time or space for complacency in the global struggle for human rights, and progress can be so easily and suddenly lost, even with respect to principles that seemed to have been well settled.
Along the way there have been challenges and moments of enormous consequence during these two decades, setting back and advancing the cause of human rights. That has included the September 11th terrorist attacks and the ensuing assault on human rights at the heart of the ‘war on terror’ that followed; the growing recognition of the enormity of the global climate crisis; the establishment of important new global institutions and laws like the International Criminal Court and the Arms Trade Treaty; and the incredible movements for change unleashed through Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Idle No More, and the exhilarating and then shattered hope of the “Arab Spring”.
(2) Rights Learnings
There are countless ways that I could frame and organize these reflections. I could offer highs and lows; attempt to formulate a year-by-year assessment or tease out key trends and themes. Where I have settled is to share a number of broadly framed learnings I have experienced. Learnings that are in no way complete, nor should they be. Some have been more obvious than others and some more challenging than others. In some instances the learning has been that there is much to unlearn.
Above all I have begun learning where to look and who to hear in understanding the essence of where the human rights journey must take us. For the greatest learnings are not to be found in the corridors of government, the lecture halls of universities, or United Nations conference rooms. The learnings that matter above all others arise at the frontlines of struggles for equality, freedom and dignity.
For me those learnings have been sixfold: to prioritize rights, embrace all rights, equalize rights, enforce rights, claim and defend rights, and ultimately, to believe in rights.
(3) Prioritize rights
When world leaders gathered in 1945 to adopt the Charter of the United Nations, they committed to four purposes for this new multilateral body, one of which talks of “international cooperation… in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms.” Three years later they adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose stirring preamble begins by asserting that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
It could not be clearer. Human rights are to be at the heart of our world order. Not something we raise with foes and ignore with friends; or expect of others but dismiss for ourselves. Not one choice among others. Not an aspiration for a later time. Yet the decades that have followed have been precisely that. So much of the human rights struggle seems to come down to grammar and, more specifically, conjunctions and prepositions, framing a set of choices between human rights and something else: or and versus, rather than and or through.
Do we put human rights at the fore, regardless of the relationships we have with different countries? When debating international justice, do we understand that framing it as peace or human rights is a false dichotomy? In confronting a terrorist threat, why the reticence to acknowledge that an approach grounded in security versus human rights sets back both imperatives? And in pursuing economic growth, the failure to commit to a business and human rights agenda undermines the sense of sustainability that must be our collective long-term goal.
(a) Human rights and ‘friendship’
Perhaps one of the most frequent disguises for a failure or refusal to put human rights first is the mask of “friendship.” Governments are quick to rush to criticism and condemnation when it comes to the human rights record of countries with whom relations are already strained or ruptured but much less enthusiastic or forceful when the violator is a close ally or trading partner. Canada, regardless of how much we profess to be a country that puts human rights first, is no exception. Like most other countries, Canada’s global human rights diplomacy is rife with contradictions and even hypocrisy, certainly undermining any claim that we consistently prioritize human rights. The bottom line is that human rights often take a back seat to “friendship”.
There is perhaps nowhere that this is more evident than with respect to the decades-old grave human rights crisis in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In a conflict in which both sides bear responsibility for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave human rights violations, Canadian governments have consistently been clear and forthright in condemning Hamas and Palestinian armed groups for abuses, such as indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza, while showing nowhere near the same inclination when it comes to widespread violations committed by Israeli forces, including consistent grave breaches of their responsibilities under international law as an occupying power. Public statements instead refer generically to the violence and instability in the region, with frequent references to the close friendship between Canada and Israel. Notably, despite a clear evidentiary record over many years, no Canadian government has ever criticized the Israeli government for war crimes.[2]
Friendship in the guise of strategic alliances has also served too often as a pretext for deprioritizing human rights. That is starkly evident in Canada’s insistence to stick with a controversial multi-billion-dollar deal to sell armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia despite that country’s responsibility for extensive war crimes in neighbouring Yemen, a position that breaches Canada’s obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty.[3] One of Canada’s arguments for authorizing the arms deal is the close relationship between the two countries, noting that Saudi Arabia “is a strong security and intelligence partner to Canada’s key defence and security allies.”[4] Similarly, along with many other countries, Canada has been disappointingly constrained, to the point of near silence, in criticizing the continuing deterioration in the human rights situation in Egypt, another country seen to be a strategic ally in the Middle East.[5]
Canada’s condemnation of human rights violations is reliable and consistent when the country concerned is not a close friend. For many years, Canada has led annually when it comes to the important UN General Assembly resolution regarding Iran’s egregious human rights situation.[6] Canada has readily condemned Russia’s abuses in Crimea,[7] the situation in Belarus,[8] and with respect to Myanmar has been critical of mass atrocities against the Rohingya population[9] and the recent military coup.[10]
Most certainly Canada has been actively outspoken with respect to the human rights and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, having cofounded the Lima Group of nations which is “committed to the return of democracy” in the country. However, Canada has not maintained that same degree of pressure and criticism with respect to the deeply troubling human rights records of partners within the Lima Group, including Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia.[11]
And of course there is the most recent, close to home, example of the precipitous decline in human rights in the United States under the Trump Administration. Perhaps most significantly, the rapid assault on the rights of refugee and migrants was met with near silence from the Trudeau government, except for one infamous early tweet from the Prime Minister, just eight days after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The tweet, while making no mention of the United States, was clearly a reaction to Donald Trump’s early Executive Orders, particularly the Muslim Ban:
To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.[12]
The disingenuousness of that tweet became abundantly clear, however, when the Canadian government refused to lift the Safe Third Country Agreement blocking refugees from making claims for protection at land border posts and eventually went to court to energetically defend the US government’s refugee rights record when that Agreement was challenged.[13]
Many will simply dismiss all of this as realpolitik, that of course a country will be harsher with enemies and gentler with friends be that with respect to human rights or any other matter. Be that as it may, it erodes the very notion of the universality of human rights.
(b) No justice, no peace
So often rights and justice are told to take a backseat to peace. Negotiations are underway to end a terrible conflict marked by mass atrocities and the warring parties will walk away, we are often told, if there is any suggestion that they will be held accountable for their horrendous war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I was haunted by that false dichotomy when I joined an Amnesty International research team in the southeast corner of Guinea, along the border with Sierra Leone, in 2001. Sierra Leone had, of course, been devastated by unspeakable human rights violations during the course of civil war between the government and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) throughout the 1990’s. Particularly wrenching was the extent to which atrocities committed in a war marked by extensive recruitment of child soldiers, were dominated by brutal crimes against children committed by traumatized children.
A 1999 peace accord[14] between the Sierra Leonean government and the RUF, brokered under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States, assumed there could be peace without justice and provided a broad amnesty for human rights violations, specifically that the government would,
“… grant absolute and free pardon and reprieve to all combatants and collaborators in respect of anything done by them in pursuit of their objectives.”[15]
All-encompassing to say the least. However, fighting and instability continued. A UN peacekeeping mission[16] was deployed but the situation was so volatile that 500 peacekeepers were captured and essentially held hostage by the RUF in May 2000. The security situation and human rights violations deteriorated sharply throughout the year.
It had become abundantly clear that not only was the amnesty provision a complete betrayal of justice, after ten years of unrelenting war crimes and crimes against humanity, neither did it bring peace. That is what we heard and witnessed at every turn as we travelled through that remote area of Guinea in March 2001, where refugees had fled from Sierra Leone in the face of renewed human rights violations as the peace accord unraveled. In fact, RUF fighters followed refugees across the border and committed further abuses in Guinea, which our team documented extensively. I will always recall one woman, responding to my standard question as to who she believed was responsible for the attacks against her family.
It’s the rebels, of course it’s the rebels. They have never paid a price for what they did to us before, so why wouldn’t they do it again and again?[17]
The fallacy of achieving peace without justice had become clear to the Sierra Leonean government. A new ceasefire was negotiated under United Nations auspices in Nigeria in November 2000. This time there were no amnesty provisions. That eventually resulted in the establishment in January 2002 of a groundbreaking new court that was a hybrid international/national judicial body, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which began to hear cases the following year and remained active until 2013. Most famously the Special Court tried and convicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for the role he had played in supporting the RUF in full knowledge of the atrocities they were committing. One-time RUF leader Foday Sankoh was also arrested, but he died in detention before being brought to trial. In all the Court indicted 14 individuals, from the RUF and the military, reflective of those determined to be “most responsible” for war crimes and crimes against humanity.[18]
This time, peace held in Sierra Leone; grounded in justice.
And what a remarkable journey for international justice over these past twenty years. That has included groundbreaking work by country specific international criminal tribunals dealing with the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Cambodia. And of course the International Criminal Court (ICC), agreed to in 1998, was officially established in July 2002 and now has an active caseload.
The ICC has faced enormous challenges and setbacks since, and has both attracted and courted its fair share of controversy. That was inevitable and entirely foreseeable. Nonetheless there have been 30 cases before the Court, some involving more than one accused. Judges have issued 35 arrest warrants, 17 individuals have been taken into custody and there have been 10 convictions and 4 acquittals. There are active cases, investigations or preliminary examinations underway with respect to 20 countries.[19]
At the same time, a growing number of countries have opened up their own national courts to international justice cases through the exercise of universal jurisdiction. Canada’s efforts have faltered, however, with not much to show, particularly recently.[20] Two trials against Rwandan nationals were held in Canada, one leading to a conviction, the other to an acquittal.[21] And after a ten-year investigation, in 2015 the RCMP issued an arrest warrant for a Syrian military intelligence official charged with torturing Canadian citizen Maher Arar in a Syrian detention centre in 2002 and 2003, the first time a foreign national has faced charges under Canadian criminal law for torture that occurred outside Canada. The accused has not yet been located, arrested and extradited to Canada.[22]
There is far to go in ensuring that international justice is reliably and consistently here to stay. And some of the steps to date may seem slow and incremental. But the sea-change has been immense. Certainly thirty years ago the very notion of international criminal tribunals and of national courts exercising universal jurisdiction over international crimes such as torture was laughable. No government was interested; too much interest in shoring up impunity, no appetite to advance justice and accountability. But survivors, families of victims, communities, human rights groups, lawyers and legal academics did not relent in the demand for justice. And those walls of impunity have slowly begun to give way.
And perhaps today I would be able to assure the rightly dismayed Sierra Leonean refugee in Guinea that going forward there will be a price to pay for grave human rights violations, bringing an end to the cycle of “again and again”.
(c) Human rights and security: can’t have one without the other
The disastrous pitfalls of pushing human rights to the side in pursuit of some other objective became abundantly clear over the past twenty years in the realm of national security. That was particularly the case after the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 and the subsequent so-called ‘war on terror’ which truly became a full-out assault on human rights. The discourse quickly became about security or human rights, security versus human rights, as if the two were opposing imperatives with a zero-sum relationship in which more of one necessarily means less of the other.
Particularly acute and troubling has been the debate about torture and security. Years of campaigning and legal developments, propelled by human rights advocates and by governments has led to strong international laws against torture, with an absolute prohibition that can never be subject to derogation or limitation. The prohibition on torture is now widely recognized to be a jus cogens norm. While torture has continued to be commonplace, its unconditional ban as a matter of law was generally not contested. But that too changed after September 11th and from many corners, including governments that had been strong champions of the effort to eradicate torture, came suggestions that torture might in fact be justified in exceptional circumstances. Might be justified when national security required it.
With so much need to continue to advance greater human rights protection on so many fronts, human rights advocates now faced a rearguard challenge and had to scramble to hold and not lose ground.
And what was obviously and painfully clear is that this notion of there being a trade-off between security and human rights was precisely the opposite. Their relationship, one to the other, is integral. Insecurity does not stem from any illusory government propensity to go too far in protecting human rights and certainly not from stellar records of combating torture. Rather it reflects longstanding neglect for human rights and the resulting injustices and inequalities. And security simply cannot be shored up by distancing ourselves further from human rights. Security lies in embracing human rights like never before.
That has been proven out at every turn when security practices have ignored human rights over these twenty years. The real human cost of years and years of grave breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law during the “national security” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is likely incalculable. And would anyone credibly assert that security has been enhanced through the extensive war crimes in both of those countries? Guantánamo Bay -- the iconic poster child of human rights trampled into oblivion in the name of security -- did nothing to avert terrorist attacks and likely only further deepened grievances and hostility through its deliberate and institutionalized dehumanization, racism and cruelty.[23]
This is not at all limited to the chain of war and abuse in September 11th’s trajectory, it long predates those attacks, and continues to be modeled by governments around the world. The Chinese government’s unfounded rhetoric of security and terrorism has become the fig leaf excuse for a campaign of mass atrocities[24] and insidious repression against the Uyhgur people that is undeniably a genocide[25] playing out in real time, recognized as such by among others the Canadian House of Commons.[26] No security there.
And as I write, another chapter of violence, repression and retaliation has just played out between Palestinians and Israelis in Jerusalem and Gaza,[27] rooted in 54 years of military occupation marked by total disregard for the rights of Palestinians, which among other inescapable human rights realities constitutes the international crime of apartheid.[28] Decades of unrelenting war crimes, crimes against humanity and other grave human rights violations – seen and interpreted through an entrenched lens of terrorism and security – have been the source of devastating suffering for the Palestinian people and served only to keep the country and the region trapped in endless cycles of fear and violence for Palestinians and Israelis alike. An approach to security that has, for decades, been the very essence of insecurity.
What has particularly stayed with me is the Canadian dimension to this security and human rights reality. Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, Muayyed Nureddin, Omar Khadr, Abousfian Abdelrazik, Hassan Diab, Mohamed Harkat, Adil Charkaoui, Hassan Almrei, Mohamed Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, Benamar Benatta, prisoners apprehended on the battlefield in Afghanistan by the Canadian military, and Canadians and their families, alleged to have ISIS links, abandoned to the dangers and hardship of detention camps in NE Syria. In the aftermath of September 11th, with a narrative of security over human rights sweeping the world, Canada was not at all immune. But it was a wake-up for many Canadians, who found it hard to believe that our country could be implicated in an extra-legal world of torture, rendition, secretive deportations, unlawful arrests, illegal imprisonment, unfair trials, unjust extradition, solitary confinement and other injustices in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Guantánamo Bay, Sudan, Afghanistan, the United States, France and immigration detention in Canada.
Canada and Canadians were indeed implicated, and it was not just an exceptional outlying case or two. It was so serious that two judicial inquiries were held,[29] an external review was conducted,[30] the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on six occasions,[31] a political crisis led to a Cabinet Minister being shuffled[32] and prorogation of Parliament,[33] UN human rights bodies and experts chastised Canada on numerous occasions over many years,[34] and financial settlements of various lawsuits seeking damages for the role of Canadian officials in these serious human rights violations have been reached, likely totaling in excess of $50 million and more still to come.[35]
Some of my most humbling moments of human rights work have come through working with these men and with their families. Their conviction to come forward and demand answers and justice – and to do so in the face of media leaks and other underhanded campaigns intent on smearing their reputations with inflamed accusations of involvement in terrorism – has been remarkable and nothing short of inspiring. Always it has been about their own right to redress but also their insistence that accountability would help prevent others from experiencing the same deep injustice.
I have learned so much. About courage. About prevailing against powerful forces and in the face of great odds. That strong messages about human rights can and do resonate even amidst the fearfulness and distorted narratives that accompany concerns about security. And that at the end of the day, human stories are the most powerful means to advance human rights change.
(d) Business and human rights
The human rights world, let alone the corporate world, was slow to recognize how essential it is to advance strong frameworks of human rights responsibility and accountability for business. When I took up the Secretary General post, Amnesty International had only very recently adopted its first set of human rights principles for companies.[36] Other human rights groups and the UN, including then Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Global Compact initiative,[37] were also similarly starting to grapple with the fact that corporate activity had enormous human rights impact around the world but was largely overlooked by the international human rights system.
Some of our earliest engagement and confrontation with Canadian companies was with the oil industry. There were some encouraging signs of emerging leadership, such as the International Code of Ethics for Canadian Business spearheaded in 1997 by Nexen Energy.[38] There were ample instances of grave concern as well, such as the involvement of Calgary-based Talisman Energy’s operations in Sudan amidst allegations of contributing to civil war and massive human rights violations in that part of the country[39] and the growing presence of Canadian oil companies operating in conflict-ridden parts of Colombia.
Very frequently in those exchanges company officials would deny that this was in any way their affair. I can recall sitting across from one CEO who told me that if the country’s human rights record was my preoccupation I should be talking with Canada’s embassy, not with him. They seemed unaware and unconcerned that governments had long ago made it clear that “every organ of society”, which certainly includes companies, must work towards securing “universal and effective recognition and observance” of the rights laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.[40]
That has moved on considerably. Very few companies would maintain the position that human rights are an irrelevant consideration in their operations. But that has perhaps brought even greater challenges, as now it is often about obfuscation, misinformation and secrecy; and about shutting down or obstructing avenues that might lead to redress and accountability.
The international human rights system has evolved. For instance, the Human Rights Council has adopted Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and has mandated a working group to work on developing a binding treaty. As well, the Council’s Working Group on Business and Human Rights has brought expertise, impartiality and scrutiny to human rights abuses around the world that are linked to corporate activity. That Working Group has carried out a detailed examination of Canada’s record on the business and human rights front.[41]
And there has been notable progress in Canada. Three court cases have significantly opened Canadian courts as an avenue for compensation for individuals and communities whose rights have been abused by Canadian companies operating abroad. Amnesty International intervened in those cases.[42] The courage and determination of the plaintiffs in all of these instances has been instrumental in achieving that progress.
But there is however, much smoke and many mirrors. An enormous campaigning initiative over ten years ago, promoting private member’s legislation developed by then-opposition Liberal Member of Parliament John McKay, came close to establishing an ombudsperson to strengthen the overseas human rights accountability of Canadian mining companies. Bill C-300 was defeated in the House of Commons in 2010.[43]
But the campaigning pressure did not relent. And in January 2018, responding to that insistence from civil society, led by the Canadian Network on Corporate Accountability, and from frontline communities impacted by Canadian mining companies, Justin Trudeau’s government announced the establishment of the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise, which would be empowered to carry out independent investigations into allegations of human rights abuse tied to the overseas operations of Canadian extractive and garment companies.[44] It promised to be a historic breakthrough. Over a year later the first Ombudsperson was appointed and, in early 2021, more than three years after the CORE was announced, her office indicated it was now ready to receive complaints.[45]
But what is largely overlooked is that over those three years the government moved away from its initial commitments about the CORE’s mandate and powers. Instead of “investigations” into company conduct the CORE will simply conduct “reviews”; and promised powers to give the CORE the muscle needed to take on powerful companies, in particular to subpoena witnesses and force disclosure of documents, are no longer part of the plan. Smoke and mirrors indeed.
These concerns are reflected as well in the broader relationship between trade policy and human rights. In hope of boosting trade and investment, Canadian governments and business leaders have championed trade deals, and eagerly organized trade missions such as the many Team Canada delegations that traveled to China during the years of the Chrétien government which largely left human rights off the table. [46] Recommendations that it should become standard practice to subject all of Canada’s bilateral and multilateral trade deals to regular independent human rights impact assessments have never been taken up by the federal government.
However, a requirement for an annual human rights report[47] was belatedly added to the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement which entered into force in 2011. Successive annual reports[48] then miraculously found no human rights concerns associated with the trade deal, because of a narrow interpretation looking only for human rights violations directly linked to a specific tariff reduction.[49] Responding to that critique, the government has indicated that “future improvements to Canada’s annual reports, potential modifications to the report’s format and methodology remain under review.”[50] What that will mean in practice remains to be seen.
And a minimal request to exempt goods and services from illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories from the benefits of the updated Canada-Israel Free Trade Agreement was rejected by the Canadian government and when implementing legislation for the new agreement was reviewed by Parliament.[51]
Some days I do not know whether I am more amazed or dismayed at the progress or lack of progress in the effort to secure a human rights-based approach to trade and business. It matters enormously. Trade policy, investment decisions and corporate activity exert enormous influence on all aspects of our lives, in every corner of the world. That has been made painfully clear amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, as the power of huge transnational pharmaceutical companies has stood in the way of equitable worldwide access to COVID vaccines.[52] One study indicates that of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, only 31 are nations, the other 69 are transnational corporations.[53] The human rights dimension of that clout cannot be ignored.
(4) Embrace all rights
It is not enough to commit and recommit to prioritizing rights. It must be about embracing all rights. It defies understanding that we still struggle with outdated, politicized human rights ideologies that divide rights and relegate some rights to spheres of lesser importance than others. That is of course most obviously so when it comes to the false dichotomy that so many governments, including in Canada, draw between civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights.
Governments’ rhetoric assures us they agree that all rights are of equal importance – to be free from torture, to go to school, to enjoy freedom of expression, and to access healthcare. On paper at least that has been so from the very start, with no differentiation or distinctions drawn among the 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was also made explicitly clear when governments came together for the 1993 World Conference of Human Rights and affirmed that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated.”[54]
Yet actions speak louder than words. And governments have consistently acted in ways that treat economic, social and cultural rights as lesser rights, not deserving of the same degree of accountability and not susceptible to the same levels of enforcement.
Equally, there is an interminable tradition of governments at all levels in Canada selling short and selling out the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly rights to land, territories and resources. Governments readily resort to the rhetoric of embracing Indigenous rights when it is relatively easy to do so, but that commitment quickly disappears when powerful economic interests are on the table.
(a) All rights: civil, political, economic, social and cultural
There is no basis at all for the frequent assertions made by many governments around the world, particularly in the Global North, that the rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are rights of a different order than those laid out in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. But that they do, constantly.
Governments in Canada certainly maintain that position which explains, in part, why vital economic, social and cultural rights to health, education, housing, food and water, among others, were not explicitly enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. And federal and provincial governments have regularly argued in court, successfully unfortunately, that other Charter provisions, such as section 7’s guarantee of life, liberty and security of the person, should not be interpreted to include life-saving health care,[55] or the security of safe and adequate housing.[56]
When the two Covenants were adopted by the United Nations in 1966, in separate treaties that reflected Cold War era politics, governments concluded an Optional Protocol providing aggrieved individuals with the prospect of making complaints about violations of civil and political rights. It was another four decades, however, before a similar Optional Protocol was developed for economic, social and cultural rights, in 2008. 116 governments have signed on to the OP for civil and political rights, but only 26 have done so for economic, social and cultural rights. Canada has been a party to the former since 1976, but more than 12 years after it was adopted, has made it abundantly clear that it has no intention to join the latter, dealing with economic, social and cultural rights.
And with one notable exception, that dismissive approach has not wavered, even as the importance and the fragility of economic, social and cultural rights has been made so apparent and laid so bare by COVID-19 and the associated economic crisis. In the early days of the pandemic, more than 300 organizations and experts launched a call to all governments in the country, urging them to put human rights at the heart of their COVID responses, with particular regard for economic, social and cultural rights.
The fact that the human rights obligations are clear, however, is not an assurance they will be upheld. That is of particular concern with many of the key human rights obligations that are at stake in the COVID-19 pandemic, including with respect to health, housing, food, safe water and other basic needs. Governments across Canada have long asserted that those and other economic, social and cultural rights are not amenable to the same enforcement as other rights, leaving their protection to the more uncertain and arbitrary political realm. However, international human rights standards require that economic, social and cultural rights be equally subject to effective oversight and enforcement as other human rights. This is particularly important during the current crisis.[57]
No government – federal, provincial, territorial or municipal – committed to do so.
But there is indeed a notable exception. Only 7 years ago, government lawyers were before the Ontario Court of Appeal, strenuously opposing an effort to advance recognition of the right to adequate housing.[58] And the government’s view prevailed in that litigation. But five years, and a change of government, later, Parliament adopted the National Housing Strategy Act in 2019, which enshrines the following declaration in Canadian law:
4. It is declared to be the housing policy of the Government of Canada to
(a) recognize that the right to adequate housing is a fundamental human right affirmed in international law; …. and
(d) further the progressive realization of the right to adequate housing as recognized in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.[59]
To have the words “right” and “housing” in the same sentence in a Canadian law was ground-breaking. To have a reference to the ICESCR enshrined in Canada law was unprecedented. Will it lead to more? That remains to be seen. Is it truly reflective of a shift in government thinking, at least at federal level, about the status and importance of economic, social and cultural rights? That too remains to be seen.
But make no mistake. This is not simply a matter of government rethinking policy. This is entirely the fruit of decades of mobilizing and advocacy, within communities facing poverty and by courageous housing activists. A campaign that did not relent no matter the setbacks; a campaign that has prevailed.
(b) The human rights of Indigenous Peoples
In Canada, for Canadians and for me personally, no human rights struggle and journey has been as fundamental as the journey to secure recognition of and commitment to the rights of Indigenous peoples.
I think of grave concerns that were brought to Amnesty International’s attention by family members, Indigenous human rights defenders, First Nations leaders and lawyers early in these twenty years, including the campaign for accountability for the 1995 police killing of Dudley George,[60] the harrowing “starlight tour” freezing deaths of Indigenous men in Saskatchewan,[61] securing recognition of the land rights of the Lubicon Cree,[62] and the endemic crisis of violence and discrimination against Indigenous women and girls.[63]
One thing that all of those struggles had in common was the failure and refusal by government leaders, police and even the courts to understand that in each instance fundamental international human rights obligations were at stake. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for instance, famously rejected calls for a national inquiry into violence against Indigenous women noting that “we should not view this as sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime. It is crime, against innocent people, and it needs to be addressed as such.”[64]
That denial however, did not mean that those struggles went away. Quite the contrary. Led by survivors, families, grassroots activists and Indigenous leadership, they continued, they grew, they transformed and the eventual consequences were enormous.
The government of Ontario eventually convened a judicial inquiry, the Ipperwash Inquiry, into the killing of Dudley George.[65] The deadly starlight tours conducted by Saskatoon police precipitated the establishment of the Commission on First Nations and Métis Peoples and Justice Reform in Saskatchewan.[66] The UN Human Rights Committee repeatedly took up the situation of the Lubicon Cree.[67] And the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people attracted major attention from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,[68] the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women[69] and, eventually, was the subject of a high-profile national inquiry,[70] which among other conclusions found that the pattern of violence and other human rights violations against Indigenous women and girls amounts to genocide.[71]
No longer could governments evade their responsibilities, enshrined after all in the Canadian Constitution and in Treaties, as somehow not centrally being about human rights obligations. That was powerfully brought home through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, in two prominent Calls to Action,[72] highlighted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as providing the framework for reconciliation in Canada:
43) We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.
44) We call upon the Government of Canada to develop a national action plan, strategies, and other concrete measures to achieve the goals of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Canada’s journey with respect to the UN Declaration tells us much about how far we have come and how far we have not come with respect to genuine respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples. The effort to draft a Declaration, underway within the UN human rights system since 1982, finally started to gather steam as the new millennium got underway. Canada had at times been disinterested, mildly supportive and a spoiler in the protracted efforts to negotiate and agree to the text. Throughout 2005, under Paul Martin’s government, Canada emerged as a generally constructive player, working positively to find compromise language acceptable to Indigenous peoples and recalcitrant governments alike. That changed abruptly when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, with Canada voting against the Declaration at the UN Human Rights Council in 2006 and in the UN General Assembly in 2007, and maintaining stiff opposition until 2010, at which point his government quietly expressed highly qualified and certainly unconvincing support for the Declaration.[73]
There was a sharp u-turn after the Trudeau government was elected in October 2015, very quickly lending unequivocal support to the Declaration in statements made nationally and at the United Nations.[74] But were those stirring words consistent with government action?
Endorsing the Declaration did not give it any particular standing in Canadian law, and the Trudeau government did not rush to remedy that gap. That fell to NDP Member of Parliament Romeo Saganash, a Cree MP from Northern Quebec who introduced private member’s legislation, Bill C-262,[75] which would have recognized the applicability of the Declaration in Canada. The Trudeau government did not lend its express support to Bill C-262 for another 19 months.[76] The Bill was eventually passed by the House of Commons on 30 May, 2018 but did not make it through the Senate before Parliament was dissolved in advance of the 2019 federal election. Despite determined leadership from First Nations Senators Lilian Dyck and Murray Sinclair, a handful of Conservative Senators blocked and obstructed Bill C-262 from coming to a final vote in time. Certainly one more shameful chapter in the history of Indigenous rights in Canada.
The Trudeau government promised they would bring it back as government legislation if re-elected. They were and they did, though it took more than a year after the election for that to get underway. Bill C-15 was tabled in the House of Commons on 3 December, 2020[77]and received Royal Assent on 21 June, 2021.
Encouraging, most certainly, but the back story is whether it truly matters. Already there are 70 legally-binding Treaties between Indigenous peoples and the Crown, going back more than 300 years, which have been abrogated and ignored far more often than they have been respected and upheld. Furthermore, “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed” in section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. Yet across the country First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples continue to face pipelines, hydroelectric projects, logging, mines, oilsands, fracking, oil and gas production, and other large-scale natural resource development projects in their lands and territories, without meaningful consultation, let alone free, prior and informed consent.
Existing legal protections are disregarded, so will more law make a difference? What Bill C-15 most significantly adds to the equation is the legal obligation to develop an implementation plan, within two years.
6 (1) The Minister must, in consultation and cooperation with Indigenous peoples and with other federal ministers, prepare and implement an action plan to achieve the objectives of the Declaration.
(2) The action plan must include
(a) measures to
(i) address injustices, combat prejudice and eliminate all forms of violence, racism and discrimination, including systemic racism and discrimination, against Indigenous peoples and Indigenous elders, youth, children, women, men, persons with disabilities and gender-diverse persons and two-spirit persons, and
(ii) promote mutual respect and understanding as well as good relations, including through human rights education; and
(b) measures related to monitoring, oversight, recourse or remedy or other accountability measures with respect to the implementation of the Declaration.
(3) The action plan must also include measures related to monitoring the implementation of the plan and reviewing and amending the plan.
The necessary aspects to make a difference are all there, including that it be developed jointly with Indigenous peoples; address injustice, prejudice, systemic racism and violence; include human rights education; and incorporate oversight and accountability measures.
The rest, clearly, lies with all of us. For surely, in Canada, when it comes to the essential imperative to embrace all rights we all carry the responsibility to ensure that reconciliation is all about, at very long last, full and genuine respect for the rights, all of the rights, of Indigenous peoples.
And clearly that is the missing piece, that the consequences of centuries of genocide and widespread human rights violations rest now on the shoulders of all of us. As I write these reflections, that failure and the responsibility to chart a different course have been laid bare, once again, with news of the discovery of the unmarked graves of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. For days there has been an outpouring of grief, gestures of commemoration and words of solidarity. But will this be the catalyst for true change?[78]
One obvious measure of real change will be to see if the government at long last abandons the opposition, frequently aggressive, that has marked its response (across both Conservative and Liberal governments) to the important legal cases and advocacy campaign initiated by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, demanding equality for First Nations children.[79]
As Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga has asked us all, “do you hear the sound of the drum, Canada?”[80]
(4) Equalize rights
Over the course of these 20 years, two of the questions I was perhaps asked and declined to answer more often than any others were, first, which country is the best or the worst in the world when it comes to human rights and, second, which human rights are more important than others? I refused to answer the first, because there is no way to objectively measure human rights in such a way as to come up with any such ranking and, of greater concern, it distracts from the fundamental notion that human rights are universal and all violations in all countries matter.
I generally declined to answer the second question as well, because I passionately adhered to the principle that “all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated” affirmed by governments at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights.[81] Pulling out one, two or three rights and elevating them above the others, risks unravelling the whole and leaving the majority of rights behind in the dust. It certainly risks playing into the notion advanced by many governments that there is something secondary about economic, social and cultural rights.
But I have come to understand and, more importantly, to see how wrong that is. For there is truly a right that does and must stand above – or at least stand out differently from – the others; the right to equality. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, crafted by governments let us not forget, makes that very clear, in the first sentence in the Declaration’s first article: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”
Governments did very much have it right in 1948. The very essence of human rights lies in equality. And we have very slowly, too slowly, been waking up to that reality. For if we do not secure that foundational promise of freedom and equality, nothing else will follow. Gender equality. Racial equality. Social equality. Equality, of all abilities. Full, intersectional equality. Without equality, free expression is meaningless, education an illusion, healthcare broken, and life, liberty and security of the person fragile and tenuous at best. Every time we sit down to respond to human rights violations, assess a human rights challenge or advance a human rights campaign; equality surely must be our starting point and our guiding star.
(a) Women’s human rights and gender equality
Early in my time as Secretary General I was dismayed as to how prevalent disregard for women’s human rights and gender equality was throughout the human rights community, including within Amnesty International. That was particularly so when it came to the violence and other grave abuses experienced by women and LGBTIQ2S+ people in the so-called ‘private sphere’, at the hands of spouses, relative, community members and complete strangers, abuses which the state ignored, tolerated or even encouraged.
Amnesty International recognized its own longstanding shortcomings in launching a global campaign to end violence against women in 2003.[82] And the next year, in Canada, we launched the Stolen Sisters report, adding Amnesty International’s research and campaigning to the efforts of Indigenous women over many years to draw attention to the shockingly high levels of violence against First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and girls in Canada.[83]
It seems such an overstatement to say there has been enormous progress, because the gravity and range of concerns with respect to women’s human rights continues to be immense. The reminders and examples -- such as the horrific school bombing in Afghanistan in May 2021 in which scores of teenage girls were killed[84] or the disturbing rise in killings of women by their male partners in the province of Quebec during the pandemic[85] -- are legion and are a devastating indictment of the ineffectiveness of efforts to address violence and discrimination against women and girls.
Yet progress has indeed been considerable. On the world stage the most courageous human rights leaders of the past twenty years have consistently been women and girls, including the women who have served as UN High Commissioners for Human Rights for three-quarters of that time, Mary Robinson, Louise Arbour, Navanethem Pillay and Michelle Bachelet, and iconic global activists such as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.
Women have been the primary mobilizers behind the Black Lives Matter, Idle No More and certainly #MeToo movements. Women and young girls have been at the heart of protests in Tahir Square in 2011, Tehran in 2017, Khartoum in 2019 and Myanmar in 2021; and of course catalyzed the Women’s Marches that followed Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. In fact, women human rights defenders power resistance to injustice and demands for change the worldover. The corollary, though, being that they face greater levels of violence and vilification for doing so.[86]
It is certainly dismal to say that it did not happen until 2010 but indeed in 2010 the United Nations significantly elevated the attention to and stature of the world body’s efforts to advance women’s equality in establishing UN Women.[87] And in adopting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, which includes a specific Goal to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,”[88] states recognized more widely that “realizing gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls will make a crucial contribution to progress across all the Goals and targets.”[89]
And while hurdles and barriers, which often seem insurmountable, are everywhere, there has been significant change. I think of the incredible movements that have successfully challenged, reformed and overturned absolute abortion bans in Chile,[90] Ireland[91] and Argentina.[92]
Progress is encouraging though still uneven and incomplete. And there is still far to travel. In Canada, there is a federal strategy for addressing gender-based violence,[93] but though underway, not yet a sorely-needed national action plan.[94] There has at long last been a National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,[95] but two years later, the supposed national plan just announced to implement the inquiry’s Calls to Justice has been decried by many as simply a plan to make a plan.[96] Recent federal commitment to a national childcare program,[97] long called for by women’s equality organizations across the country,[98] is certainly a major breakthrough; far from where policy and thinking was in 2000. But the glaring sexism and ineptitude laid bare in the failure to address sexual harassment and abuse within the Canadian Armed Forces, including at the most senior levels of leadership, in 2021 is beyond disheartening.[99] A Feminist International Assistance Policy[100] and National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security[101] are in place, and a wider Feminist Foreign Policy is being developed.[102]
Politically, the federal cabinet and composition of the Senate both hover around gender parity for the first time in Canadian history, and Chrystia Freeland has, at very long last, become the first woman to serve as federal Minister of Finance in Canadian history. Yet from a historic high-water point in 2013, when six of Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial premiers were women, in June 2021 only one of the 13 premiers, and four of the 22 mayors of Canada’s largest cities are women.[103] And even as the participation of women in politics has risen, albeit unevenly and insufficiently, so too has toxic abuse and violence against them, certainly within online and social media platforms.[104]
When it comes to recognition and protection of the rights of LGBTIQ2S+ individuals, these twenty years very clearly show us that there can be encouraging progress and formidable opposition at the same time.
In 2000 no country in the world had yet legalized same sex marriage, and only a handful recognized lesser variations such as civil unions and partnerships; but by 2020 same-sex marriages were recognized by law in 29 countries, with several more poised to take that step.[105] Canada was the fourth country to do so, when Parliament passed the Civil Marriage Act in 2005. That momentum has been steady and has been global, including at least one country now on every continent. However, in 2021 there are 71 countries in which consensual sexual activity in private between two people of the same sex is criminalized; including 11 countries in which the potential punishment extends to the death penalty.[106] Uneven progress indeed.
Progressing and regressing is certainly apparent when it comes to securing rights protection for transgender individuals. The past twenty years have seen encouraging steps forward in Canada, with all federal, provincial and territorial jurisdictions now enshrining prohibitions against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and all but two provinces extending that to gender expression in their human rights laws. Federal legislation to do so, brought forward by the Trudeau government in 2016 following earlier efforts to do so by NDP MPs through private member’s legislation, met vociferous opposition from a number of Senators, but was adopted in 2017.[107] The courage and determination of individuals within the trans community across the country in advancing these vital legal reforms has been beyond inspirational.
Yet, discrimination and violence against transgender individuals remains a pressing human rights concern globally. Noting a continuing increase in yearly reports of killings of trans and gender-diverse people, Transgender Europe recorded 350 such killings worldwide in the 12 months leading up to the Trans Day of Remembrance in 2020.[108] During the Trump Administration a ban on transgender individuals serving in the US military was instituted.[109] And there have been a surge of legislative initiatives at state level across the United States in 2021 aimed at restricting the rights of transgender individuals, particularly in healthcare and sports.[110]
As such, efforts to consistently secure stronger recognition of the rights of LGBTIQ2S+ people within multilateral international human rights bodies continue to be contentious, with a number of governments objecting to the inclusion of any such language and voting against any such resolutions. Nonetheless, the Human Rights Council took the historic step of establishing an Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity[111] in 2016, a clear outcome of untiring campaigning efforts by human rights defenders around the world. And Canada has shown leadership in being one of the principal conveners of the ground-breaking Equal Rights Coalition, which brings together “42 Member States dedicated to the protection of the rights of LGBTI persons.”[112]
What endures for me, above all, however is that over the course of these past twenty years, whether it has been at home or abroad, no matter the country and whatever the human rights issue in the spotlight, women, girls and LGBTIQ2S+ human rights defenders have invariably taught me the most and shown me the essence of courage and resilience.
(b) Anti-Black racism
Racism pervades the denial of human rights. Wherever and however injustice rears its ugly head, the roots are so very often found in racism and racism fuels the ongoing repression and violence. Everywhere. Grounded in white supremacy, racism has devastating impact on all other races. That is universally so when it comes to anti-Black racism – long institutionalized, ingrained and insidious in every corner of the world. Anti-Black racism has been and continues to be at the heart of centuries of genocide,[113] slavery, colonialism, forced displacement, apartheid, sexual violence, political and social exclusion, segregation, profiling, police violence, over-incarceration, poverty, economic deprivation, stereotyping and violations of virtually all human rights; everywhere.
And has the human rights movement approached it as such? Clearly not. In fact the international human rights system’s own beginnings effectively embraced the racist global boundaries set by colonialism as acceptable limits. Geopolitics, governance models and global economic systems that should have been entirely rejected and prohibited as the very antithesis of universal human rights, that deprived the overwhelming majority of the world’s peoples of the equality and freedom which define human rights, instead were allowed to thrive, and still do.
Only three sub-Saharan African nations were “independent” and at the table in 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, one being apartheid-era South Africa. And those numbers did not significantly begin to shift until the 1960’s. In so many ways the rules of the universal human rights game were set with only about 1/3 of the players on the field; with many of those players playing on the same colonial team.
There has been an urgency – so overdue and so necessary – to the movement to confront anti-Black racism in recent years, catalyzed by the courage and insistence of Black Lives Matter and fueled by unrelenting police killings and violence against Black people across the United States,[114] in Canada[115] and many other countries. That has intensified dramatically after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020. And it begs the question whether the human rights community has responded. Of course they have, we have. There are ample reports, press releases and petitions to show for it. But no, not truly; not as it merits.
The rules of the game are so very often allowed to stand in the way. Human rights advocacy is not political, so confronting the political systems and power structures that benefit from and perpetuate anti-Black racism is seen as largely off limits. Human rights norms generally accept the state’s power and prerogative to set and enforce criminal laws, so over-criminalization, over-policing, and over-incarceration never seem to be centrally in the frame. And legitimate demands that a human rights approach to the dismantling of colonialism must include serious consideration of substantial reparations for the devastating, multi-generational harms that have been perpetrated,[116] are generally dismissed as being unrealistic or about the past rather than the future.[117] Instead, the resources needed to address those deeply entrenched impacts in marginalized communities or in countries struggling with endemic poverty are seen through the lens of aid, assistance and charity rather than an obligation to provide and a right to receive redress for grave human rights violations that go back centuries.
Importantly, this does not only invite reflection as to whether the human rights movement has taken up the right issues, at the right time, to address racism; it also means reflection on our relationships, ways of working and power structures. It necessitates acknowledging and addressing the systemic racism that has permeated the human rights community itself as well.
Among the most challenging and important pieces of my own human rights journey has been realizing that I too have far to go in confronting how I benefit from and perpetuate racism. Being a human rights activist by no means exempts me, nor any of us.[118]
(c) Refugees, migrants and the borders of human rights
“But I’ve left my country, I don’t have any more rights.” Having fled fighting between government and armed opposition forces in N’Djamena, Chad, during which his wife was killed and he was separated from the rest of his family, those were the fatalistic words of a man in his 70’s who I interviewed in a makeshift refugee camp in northern Cameroon in May 2008.[119] And although international law is replete with treaties that do indeed enshrine his rights, his words capture the lived reality of refugees and migrants across the world and certainly reflect the laws and policies of far too many governments and the crass politics of far too many xenophobic and racist leaders.
Over the course of these twenty years the public discourse about refugees and migrants has readily tended to breathless hyperbole. There is often talk of mass exoduses and sudden influxes, the burden on host countries, and borders being out of control. So often the headlines raise alarm about a “refugee crisis”. The hyperbole gives way to bigotry with talk of “illegal” border-crossings and conflating refugees and migrants with criminality and terrorism. Increasingly, politicians of all stripes and on every continent have readily pandered to and fueled nativism and racism on the backs of refugees and migrants as a means of gaining votes and winning elections. That has of course been disgracefully on display in recent years with such notorious leaders as Donald Trump in the United States and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
The numbers of people forcibly displaced around the world, as refugees and internally-displaced, has indeed risen considerably. UNHCR notes that the rate of displacement has close to doubled from 1 out of every 174 people worldwide in 2005, to 1 in 97 today.[120] In 2021, 80 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes, including a staggering 6.6 million Syrians. If they made up their own nation, forcibly-displaced people would inhabit the 20th most populous country on earth.
Not surprising, therefore, that so many of the Amnesty International fact-finding teams I have joined have focused on the situation of refugees, migrants, and the internally displaced, including in Guinea, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Bangladesh, Burundi, Tanzania, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Cameroon, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico and the United States. And that a great deal of the multilateral advocacy work I have been part of, at the UN Security Council, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UN treaty bodies and Special Procedures, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, has sought to stem erosion of and advance respect for the rights of refugees and migrants.
So, yes, it is an enormous challenge. But is it a crisis, at least in the ways that the word crisis is generally attached personally to refugees themselves? The crisis, and there is one, lies not with refugees but in the nature and impact of the cruel policies and enforcement measures enacted by governments around the world, which have made seeking refugee protection a deadly affair. Overloaded boats capsize and are turned back at sea. Disgraceful “cooperation” and return agreements are concluded with countries such as Libya,[121] Turkey,[122] Sudan,[123] Mexico,[124] and Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras,[125] which are blatantly motivated by refugee exclusion not protection. Border walls and barbed wire fences grow higher, wider and longer, enforced by more police, more soldiers, more cameras and more weaponry. Visas make it impossible for people from war torn countries to board planes. And refugee resettlement numbers never rise above the tiniest fraction of what is needed, even though the capacity to offer more clearly exists. That is the crisis.
Yet there are at the same time very many reminders, large and small, that compassion and solidarity can and do prevail. That was certainly the case in Germany in 2015, when the country’s borders were opened to around one million refugees.[126] Countries in the Global South have demonstrated a remarkable level of welcome which, while certainly not at all perfect, would never be considered in the Global North, including to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, Syrian refugees in Lebanon, and South Sudanese refugees in Uganda. And Canadians nationwide joined together in a major Syrian refugee sponsorship program in 2016, leading to a record year for refugee resettlement to Canada.[127]
A reflection that lies deep for me, however, as a Canadian who has sought to advance refugee rights as a lawyer, activist, decision-maker and academic for well over 35 years is how easy a ride Canada has generally had on the world stage. It is repeated so often as to simply be taken as a given, that ours is a country devoted to welcoming and offering protection to refugees. And while there are certainly high-water moments, including the resettlement of Indochinese[128] and Syrian refugees, the truth is that we have simply never been tested and have never truly had to prove the depth and sincerity of those convictions.
There have been some blatantly disgraceful moments over these twenty years, such as when Stephen Harper’s government stripped refugee claimants of access to federally-funded health care, as part of a strategy meant to curtail the arrival of refugees who his ministers frequently derisively referred to as “bogus”.[129] That punitive measure was overturned by the Federal Court,[130] and was under appeal to the Federal Court of Appeal when it was reversed very soon after the Trudeau government was elected in 2015.[131]
What truly spotlights the disingenuous claim that Canada is the land of #RefugeesWelcomeHere is the approach to refugee protection at the Canada/US border and, in particular, the impact of the Safe Third Country Agreement which effectively closes down access to refugee protection at official land border posts to most refugee claimants coming to Canada through the United States. Beginning with amendments to the Immigration Act in 1993 and the various chapters of negotiating, drafting, finalizing and defending the agreement in court, the governments of Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, and Justin Trudeau all carry a piece of this shameful story; a truly nonpartisan betrayal of refugee rights.
Canada’s obsession with making it more and more difficult for refugees to make protection claims at the Canada/US border is particularly pathetic when viewed globally. Pathetic given the serious and legitimate fears and concerns refugees have had, even before the full out assault under the Trump Administration, that their rights would be violated and disregarded in the US asylum system, particularly in light of atrocious US immigration detention practices and policies that make it very difficult for refugee women to have claims based on domestic violence accepted. Pathetic given the family and community links that often make Canada a more obvious destination. And pathetic given the small numbers at stake – even in years when refugee claims at the border have perhaps been as high as 25,000 – which pale in a global context of what is expected and required of other countries faced with influxes of more than one million refugees. Given all those considerations it has been dismal to see the consistent insistence of consecutive federal governments to shut down that border to refugees.
Amnesty International joined with the Canadian Council for Refugees, the Canadian Council for Churches and individual refugee claimants in challenging the STCA in court; twice. Both times, Federal Court judges who heard the extensive evidence ruled that the Agreement violates the Charter and overturned it. Both times, the Federal Court of Appeal, on narrow legal grounds that barely touch on the merits of the case and the gravity of concerns on the ground in the United States at all, reversed those rulings. The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the first challenge. It remains to be seen if they will grant leave this time. [132]
Meanwhile, Canada’s claims of generosity to refugees are belied by this dogged defence of an indefensible agreement, as is the credibility of our interventions with other governments, urging them to keep borders open in the face of influxes far greater than anything we have ever seen at the US border.
Refugees welcome here? We have far to go to prove we are truly worthy of that claim.
(d) A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian
In the 2015 federal election campaign Justin Trudeau famously criticized Prime Minister Stephen Harper for changes his government had made to the Citizenship Act making it possible to strip dual national Canadian citizens of their Canadian citizenship. Citizens who only had Canadian citizenship did not face that same risk. It was a clear instance of discrimination. In a televised debate Justin Trudeau passionately reminded Stephen Harper that, “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian”.[133] The Trudeau government did subsequently repeal those amendments.[134]
However, there has been a constant, disturbing undercurrent throughout these past twenty years that does point to differential treatment of Canadians with dual (or multiple) nationality and those with only Canadian citizenship. It comes up repeatedly when Canadians are imprisoned abroad in situations where they face a serious risk of torture and other grave human rights violations. The inescapable further undercurrent? That white Canadians get more support than racialized, dual national Canadians.
As I share these reflections it is safe to assume that a high percentage of Canadians are aware of the “two Michaels”. Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who are both white and do not have dual nationality, have been cruelly and unjustly imprisoned in China since 10 December (ironically International Human Rights Day), 2018.[135] It is blatantly politically motivated, an effort by Chinese authorities to exert pressure on the Canadian government to deny the US request to extradite Meng Wanzhou, a senior executive with and daughter of the CEO of electronics giant Huawei. The Michaels have been arbitrarily arrested, held in solitary confinement, subject to other treatment and detention conditions that likely amounts to torture, faced a blatantly unfair trial, had very limited access to family communication, and frequently been denied consular visits.
Rightly, their situation is lodged at the highest levels of the Canadian government. There have been three Ministers of Foreign Affairs over the course of the 2 ½ years they have been imprisoned, and the plight of the two Michaels has consistently been a top priority for Ministers Freeland, Champagne and Garneau. They have raised the cases repeatedly with their US and Chinese counterparts. Minsters Champagne and Garneau pursued a multilateral effort to secure support for a Declaration on Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations, now endorsed by 63 governments.[136] The Declaration is generic and does not single out a specific country, but it is widely known to be motivated by the case of the two Michaels. Similarly, Prime Minister Trudeau has discussed the two Michaels with Presidents Trump and Biden.[137] Canada’s Ambassador to China’s focus on securing their release is such that he spent three weeks in Washington in April, 2021 for high-level talks.[138]
Compare all of this attention and activity to another Canadian imprisoned in China, Huseyin Celil.[139] Huseyin Celil was arrested in 2006 while visiting his wife’s family in Uzbekistan. He was subsequently “deported” to China in circumstances that were so lacking in any degree of fairness as to truly be tantamount to an extraordinary rendition. He has been there ever since, 15 years now.
Huseyin Celil is a Uyghur man, an Imam and leader in the Uyghur community who had fled repression and persecution in China and was resettled to Canada as a refugee, subsequently becoming a Canadian citizen. While he had travelled to Uzbekistan on his Canadian passport and entirely considered himself to be Canadian, Chinese authorities refuse to recognize his Canadian citizenship and treat him as having only Chinese nationality.
Over the course of these 15 years Canadian officials have not been allowed to have one single consular visit with Huseyin. He has endured harsh prison conditions, almost certainly suffered extensive torture and ill-treatment, and was tried and convicted in a trial that did not come close to meeting minimal standards of fairness. For the past four years, amidst the massive crackdown and genocide against the Uyghur population in China, there is no word of his fate as there has been no further communication from his mother and sister, who had been allowed to visit him infrequently in prison and were the only channel for news of his well-being. The agony for his wife Kamila Telendibaeva, who has raised their four sons in Burlington, Ontario on her own, has been beyond belief.[140]
There was a short period of time, in the immediate aftermath of Huseyin Celil’s arrest and imprisonment, during which Canadian authorities, including Prime Minister Harper, were demonstrably and publicly advocating for his release. That has not been so in more than a decade. And while there are often non-specific assurances that his case is a priority concern for the government, other signs indicate quite the opposite.
In an appearance before a parliamentary committee in February 2020 Canada’s Ambassador to China initially did not recognize Huseyin Celil’s name and then when prodded quickly indicated erroneously that, “because he is not a Canadian citizenship holder, we are not able to get access to him on the consular service side.”[141] He is, of course, a Canadian citizen and was travelling as such. Appearing before the same Special Committee on Canada-China Relations on 7 June, 2021, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs erroneously implied in her testimony that Huseyin Celil was travelling using Chinese documents.[142] Travelling seems an unfortunate way to describe the experience of what was essentially an abduction and rendition; and Huseyin Celil did not possess a Chinese passport, let alone use it for that particular family trip to Uzbekistan. Perhaps these errors around how he arrived in China, what passport he was using and what citizenship he holds would be understandable in the early months of a case; but after 15 years?
There have of course been other infamous examples of the two tiers of citizenship. Notoriously, Stephen Harper’s government not only refused to take even minimal steps to safeguard the rights of Omar Khadr while he was detained in Guantánamo Bay, but he and other Ministers regularly vilified him in media statements and fundraising emails to Conservative Party supporters.[143]
Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, whose cases have been the subject of two judicial inquiries, were not only unable to count on full Canadian government support while they were tortured and unlawfully imprisoned in Syria and additionally, in Mr. Elmaati’s case, Egypt, but in fact Canadian law enforcement, security and diplomatic officials acted in ways that directly contributed to those grave human rights violations.[144] Even today, Abousfian Abdelrazik[145] and Hassan Diab,[146] who have each been through human rights nightmares in Sudan and France respectively, for which there is considerable Canadian responsibility, have not received apologies or redress.
Currently, this concern is blatantly evident in the Canadian government’s refusal to provide assistance to an estimated 47 Canadian citizens – 8 men, 13 women and 26 children – alleged to be linked to ISIS, who are detained in “overcrowded, filthy, and life-threatening conditions” in makeshift prisons and locked camps administered by Kurdish forces in NE Syria.[147]
There are exceptions. For instance, the Trudeau government engaged significantly in the successful effort to secure the release of Concordia University Professor Homa Hoodfar – a triple national of Canada, Iran and Ireland – from imprisonment in Iran; though the key strategy of involving the government of Oman as an interlocutor was primarily initiated by her family.[148] And in April 2018, after more than a decade of arbitrary arrest, an unfair trial and harsh prison conditions, Bashir Makhtal was released from imprisonment in Ethiopia. A year before he was released, Omar Alghabra, the Parliamentary Secretary responsible for consular affairs, had travelled to Ethiopia[149] to advocate directly on Mr. Makhtal’s behalf, although at other times Canadian efforts were lacklustre and the pressure exerted on the Ethiopian government appeared to be minimal.[150]
All of this is often famously compared to the case of Brenda Martin, who is white and not a dual-national.[151] Jason Kenney, who was Secretary of State in the Harper government at the time, flew to Mexico in 2008 to advocate on her behalf and the government paid a fine related to her conviction on fraud charges. She subsequently returned to Canada on a government-chartered plane.
A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian? Not all the time.
(e) Decriminalizing human rights
Governments frequently remind us that they have what they would consider to be both a right and obligation to make use of criminal law as a means of providing public safety and enforcing norms of behaviour that have been agreed by society. And that is of course very much the case. It has often meant, however, that there are large swaths of government action that are somehow considered to be outside of legitimate human rights critique. It is an approach to human rights that leaves sizable sectors of the population beyond human rights protection and, not surprisingly, those are overwhelming groups that are most vulnerable to widespread and systematic human rights violations.
Historically the examples are horrendous, perhaps most notoriously the sinister web of laws that authorized and institutionalized slavery and later segregation in the United States or apartheid in southern Africa and criminalized all manner of actions seeking to protect individuals subject to those racist and violent practices and more widely to challenge and end those abhorrent laws.
It has continued to be a challenge, however, to expose and take on all of the ways in which criminalization essentially amounts to an attack on human rights. Clear and obvious when a criminal law prohibits a peaceful demonstration, shuts down independent media or bans political opposition groups. But what of the devastating impact on human rights of laws that ban all access to safe abortions, criminalize sex work, or make it illegal to possess even small quantities of drugs?
Admittedly the human rights community has been slow and frequently reluctant to take this on. But it is essential. Criminalization in these contexts has dramatically disproportionate impact on women, on racialized communities, LGBTQI2S+ people, people with disabilities, people living in poverty, and individuals facing addictions and mental and other health challenges.
It is no answer to simply say, it is the law. We are challenged to ask, does the law comply with human rights; and have far too often been remiss in failing to do so. I was in the room during difficult and important debates within Amnesty International over the past twenty years with respect to abortion rights, and decriminalization of sex work and drug possession. In the end, comprehensive new positions and policies have been adopted, powerfully making the case as to why human rights absolutely do implore us to oppose criminalization.[152] Those debates have now moved into other crucial realms, including laws with respect to immigration detention and border control, and the very nature of policing and law enforcement.
It is essential to recognize that so often it is uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of criminal sanctions that may be one of the most significant factors lying at the heart of racism and discrimination.
(6) Implement and enforce rights
I would not be able to begin to count the op-eds,[153] UN briefs,[154] reports,[155] media interviews, speeches, parliamentary submissions, and other materials and presentations I have written, delivered or contributed to over the past twenty years that have spotlighted the glaring enforcement and implementation gap that so directly and significantly undermines efforts to uphold international human rights.
Over that time span there have been great moments of celebration when ground-breaking new human rights instruments have been adopted, often after long and contentious negotiations, dealing with the arms trade, torture prevention, enforced disappearances, the rights of persons with disabilities, the human rights responsibilities of business, and the rights of Indigenous peoples, among other concerns. Now, while there are still of course important human rights issues that have not yet been adequately elaborated and enshrined in international instruments, for the most part the norms and standards exist – in fact they frequently exist in multiple treaties, declarations and resolutions – and the true challenge lies in holding states accountable to the great promises they have drafted and adopted.
In Canada and worldwide, that distance between human rights promise and human rights reality is considerable. In fact, at times, it seems to grow, not shrink. That is distressing most obviously because it means that human rights that should be respected and upheld are not. It is also troubling in that the disconnect between what states put to paper and how they act in many respects makes a mockery of the very notion of universal human rights, which serves only to erode public confidence and diminish hope.
(a) Global enforcement
That said, there has indeed been progress, notably when it comes to international justice, discussed earlier in this article,[156] which has certainly toughened enforcement measures against individual perpetrators of the very worst human rights crimes. And the decision to dismantle the UN Commission on Human Rights and replace it with the UN Human Rights Council was, to some extent, a step in the right direction. The advent of the new Universal Periodic Review process at the Council does at least guarantee that every country’s human rights record will be globally scrutinized at regular intervals.
There have been frequent debates and initiatives over these past twenty years about reforming the UN human rights treaty bodies, which are entrusted with the responsibility of overseeing implementation of and compliance with the respective covenants and conventions they supervise but have only the ability to make recommendations to states and no binding enforcement powers to back that up. Those initiatives have, however, often been motivated by efforts to curtail the effectiveness of the treaty bodies. Meanwhile, talk of creating a World Court of Human Rights, a global companion to regional human rights courts that exist in Europe, the Americas and Africa, attracts interest and enthusiastic discussion among academics and civil society groups[157] but there is clearly little or no appetite among states to take such a step.
Other UN reform efforts have pointed in the right direction, but are yet to make any concrete difference when it comes to enforcement and implementation, such as the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, a framework for preventing and responding to mass atrocities that was championed by Canada and has been frequently invoked or referenced in UN Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council Resolutions.[158] Sadly, though, to very little avail in terms of making a substantial difference on the ground in the countries referenced, including Syria, Myanmar, South Sudan, North Korea or the Central African Republic.
Efforts to pursue reforms that would end the disgraceful deadlock at the Security Council, where veto bluster and politics take precedence over meaningful responses to human rights crises, has gone absolutely nowhere. Two similar proposals to at least curtail the use of vetoes by permanent members of the Security Council in resolutions dealing with mass atrocities have each been supported by over 100 countries, but have not been demonstrably taken up by China, Russia and the United States.[159] Instead, vetoes, or the threat or expectation of a veto, have continued to thwart Security Council action in responding to some of the most egregious human rights crises the world faces.
I think of the frequent meetings I had with Security Council members between 2012 and 2015, following fact-finding trips to the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan in Sudan, parts of which were sealed off from the outside world and experiencing unrelenting indiscriminate aerial bombardment by the Sudanese military.[160] There were so many concrete steps, including sanctions, that the Security Council could have taken. But always the response was the same, it will be vetoed.
(b) Federalism and Canada’s human rights implementation deficit
That is the global stage. What about domestically? Canada after all has long positioned itself as an ardent champion of human rights. Surely our adherence to the country’s international obligations is exemplary?
In December 2002, the UN adopted the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (OPCAT), a long and cumbersome title for an important new treaty focused on preventing torture and ill-treatment through international and national inspections of detention centres. With a combined sense of certainty, optimism and perhaps naivety, I expected and assumed at the time that there would be early news of Canada being one of the first countries to ratify this important new treaty.
Having Canada join OPCAT would be of benefit both domestically and internationally. While torture is clearly not a major issue within Canadian prisons there is certainly longstanding concern about the widespread use of prolonged solitary confinement federally and provincially, which UN human rights experts have repeatedly concluded does amount to torture, particularly when it extends beyond 15 days.[161] That prohibition has now been enshrined in the UN’s “Mandela Rules”.[162] UN human rights bodies have repeatedly called on Canada to limit the use of solitary confinement, including the UN Committee against Torture in 2018:
“[Canada] should ensure that solitary confinement, in both federal and provincial correctional facilities, is used only in exceptional cases as a last resort, for as short a time as possible (no more than 15 consecutive days) and subject to independent review, and only pursuant to the authorization by a competent authority.”[163]
There is significant foreign policy benefit to Canada joining OPCAT as well. Torture remains a grim and harrowing human rights reality in countries around the world. Most of those countries have no meaningful domestic enforcement or oversight mechanisms to safeguard against torture and the prevention-focused inspections that come with OPCAT could be tremendously beneficial. However, Canada cannot credibly call on any of those countries to commit to a treaty which Canada itself has not joined.
Two compelling reasons to commit to OPCAT but instead, more than 18 years later, while 91 countries (including almost all of Canada’s closest allies in Europe and Latin America) are now parties to the treaty, Canada has yet to take that obvious step. There have been numerous statements over the years indicating that the government was considering doing so. And in May 2016, at an event organized by Amnesty International, the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Stephane Dion, indicated that OPCAT would no longer be “optional” for Canada and that consultations with provincial and territorial governments would go forward, towards Canadian accession to the treaty.[164]
Yet more than five years after that encouraging announcement, OPCAT does indeed remain entirely optional, and there has been no public reporting providing an update or outcome of consultations, a timeline or any other relevant information. No government minister has repeated Minister Dion’s earlier promise. Meanwhile, other countries are baffled by Canada’s reticence. 27 governments – including close allies like the United Kingdom and Germany – raised their concern about Canada’s failure to accede to OPCAT when Canada’s human rights record was last examined under the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review Process in 2018.[165]
This reluctance does not mean that Canada is opposed to preventing torture, of course not. What it primarily points to is that Canadian federalism so very often stands in the way of the concrete progress and implementation needed to ensure international human rights compliance in the country.
It begins within and across the federal government itself. When it comes to Canada’s international human rights obligations, who is in charge? Which Minister bears primary responsibility? Where are the government’s overarching international and national human rights action plans? The answers to those questions are: it is never clear, several do thus no one truly does, and they do not exist.
That is certainly not the case in many other countries, where there is much more clarity. I cannot remember how many times I have led Amnesty International meetings with government officials in countries around the world which have included sitting down with the Minister of Human Rights. Other countries have appointed roving global Ambassadors for Human Rights.[166] And there are numerous examples of countries which have adopted human rights action plans or strategies.[167]
The best description of Canada’s approach to human rights at federal level is that it is sprinkled across government. The Minister of Foreign Affairs leads when it comes to engaging internationally; except when another Minister does. The Minister of Justice leads when it comes to human rights laws and human rights in court; except when another Minister does. Other Ministers, including Ministers of Indigenous Services, Crown-Indigenous Relations, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, Public Safety, Women and Gender Equality, International Trade, International Development, Families, Children and Social Development, Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, Diversity and Inclusion and Youth,… (you see my point), lead when it comes to human rights considerations relevant to their mandate; except when another Minister does.
And rather peculiarly and perhaps not intuitively, the Minister of Canadian Heritage leads when it comes to pulling all of the pieces together, bringing in provincial and territorial governments, engaging with civil society groups and Indigenous peoples’ organizations, and coordinating Canada’s engagement with and implementation of the country’s international human rights obligations. An unusual choice, perhaps, for a Ministry more generally associated with arts, culture, media, the CBC and museums, but a role that ministry has nevertheless played for decades.[168]
All of this is further complicated when provincial and territorial governments are factored in. Almost all matters arising from Canada’s international human rights obligations touch in some way on areas that are constitutionally within the jurisdiction of provinces and territories. Therefore, while the federal government may be Canada’s representative at the United Nations when those obligations are assumed and when they are scrutinized, very often the federal government does not have the powers to enact reforms or take necessary action to comply. And provincial and territorial governments at best show inconsistent and unpredictable interest in, let alone commitment to, the country’s international human rights obligations. Brazenly, in November 2020, the government of Alberta made it explicitly clear, in fact, that the province did not see itself as bound by those obligations as they had not been assumed by the provincial government directly.[169]
So how does the nation come together in a shared endeavour to ensure that those international human rights obligations are respected, regardless of where the division of powers in sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution may assign authority? The answer? Barely.
In fact there have been very few meetings of federal, provincial and territorial ministers to dig into this question of human rights implementation. Notoriously there was a 29-year gap between one such meeting in 1988 and two more recent meetings in 2017 and 2020.[170] Throughout those decades the only body bringing governments together was a committee of mid-ranking officials, known as the Continuing Committee of Officials on Human Rights, which does not meet or report publicly, and has no decision-making power. In fact, when I took up the role of Secretary General in 2000, I could not get any information as to the Continuing Committee’s membership, agenda, or meeting outcomes and was most certainly not allowed to attend, even briefly to make a presentation.
Only half in jest I often commented that I found it easier to engage with the government on national security matters, even in the aftermath of September 11th, than to get clear information about implementation of human rights obligations. While that has improved in recent years, with several sessions that have included civil society groups and Indigenous peoples’ organizations, the Continuing Committee’s role as a body for effectively and accountably delivering human rights implementation remains limited.
Two new bodies have been established in the past several years. The Senior Officials Committee Responsible for Human Rights brings governments together at a more senior level of assistant deputy ministers. Deliberations, discussions and outcomes, however, are once again not public and the committee is not expressly empowered to make decisions. In 2020 ministers responsible for human rights at long last committed to meet regularly and have established the Ministerial Forum on Human Rights as a body to support those meetings and associated work. It remains to be seen whether that will lead to the effective, coordinated, transparent and accountable approach to international human rights implementation that is sorely needed in Canada and which could, possibly, serve as a model to other countries.[171]
Meanwhile uncertainty, confusion and secrecy prevail. It makes it impossible to understand what discussions, if any, are underway to advance accession to OPCAT. It also means that there is very little information available as to what steps governments are taking to act upon the important recommendations that come out of human rights reviews conducted by the seven UN treaty bodies that oversee treaties Canada has ratified,[172] UN Special Procedures experts such as the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples or the Working Group on Business and Human Rights following their visits to Canada, the UN’s Universal Periodic Review carried out by other states, or recommendations from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which has had jurisdiction over Canada since we joined the Organization of American States in 1990.
It remains to be seen whether the Forum of Ministers on Human Rights will at long last open the way to effective, coordinated, transparent and accountable international human rights implementation in Canada. That such an essential goal has remained elusive over these past twenty years is one of my greatest disappointments.
(7) Claim and defend rights
Rights exist, no matter what. They are inherent and inalienable. Rights truly soar when they are claimed and when they are defended. When people and communities claim their rights; change happens. And the companion to claiming rights is that we all have a shared responsibility and imperative to defend rights; which means all rights, for all people, at all times. Joining and witnessing the efforts of frontline, grassroots human rights movements and defenders have without a doubt been the most encouraging and humbling moments for me over these two decades.
Claiming and defending rights should of course be encouraged, welcomed and celebrated. And it often is; as the courage and power that propels human rights struggle is truly unstoppable. But the harsher reality is that as people and movements come forward to claim and defend rights they are vilified and attacked, more violently and with greater impunity in all corners of the world.
When I took up the Secretary General role, the world had recently adopted a new UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders,[173] marking the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1998 and, in 2000, created the new post of UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders.[174] While there was clearly a sense of very real concern about the challenges, threats and danger faced by human rights defenders, there was also a prevailing sense of optimism. The human rights movement had grown exponentially throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s in all corners of the world. The adoption of the Declaration and appointment of the Special Rapporteur brought recognition as to how essential that had become, recognition that as human rights defenders flourish, so to do human rights.
Yet twenty years later the grim reality is that human rights defenders are very much under siege, targeted by governments, armed groups and businesses throughout the world. The UN Special Rapporteur,[175] other UN human rights experts and bodies,[176] international human rights organizations,[177] journalists,[178] and human rights defenders themselves,[179] have increasingly raised the alarm that the situation of human rights defenders is rapidly becoming more dangerous. The dangers faced by women[180] and LGBTIQ+[181] human rights defenders, and by Indigenous, land and environmental, human rights defenders[182] have become particularly acute. Perhaps it is an inevitable backlash from those whose abuse and misuse of power is challenged by human rights defenders. It underscores how vital it is for all of us to bring solidarity to their frontline efforts, and an insistence that the space to defend human rights remain open and safe.
And it is important to recognize that human rights defenders in Canada face challenges, and even danger, including violence, when they stand up for human rights. Human rights activists and organizations were targeted in a variety of ways by measures such as being singled out for audits related to charitable status, withdrawal of funding and public vilification during Stephen Harper’s government. The situation had become so pervasive and troubling that a coalition of more than 200 organizations across the country, Voices-Voix, came together between 2010 and 2020 in response.[183]
Currently there are serious concerns about the treatment of Indigenous and environmental land defenders at the hands of the RCMP, in connection with protests in the traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en people[184] and at Fairy Creek,[185] in British Columbia.
(a) To the streets
There has probably been nothing as exhilarating and encouraging over these past two decades than the incredible people power that has spilled out into public squares, parks and city streets, at protest camps and barricades along logging and mining access roads, in front of parliaments, courthouses, prisons and police stations, outside corporate annual general meetings, at the United Nations, in refugee camps, and across the many platforms and channels of the digital world. Whether it has been a handful of land defenders on an isolated forest road in northern British Columbia, or well over a million demonstrators in the centre of Santiago, the impetus and the demand has been the same: respect human rights, now.
There have been so many tremendous times of mobilization, with electrifying sounds, slogans and images of protest that spread rapidly, often virally, around the world. There have been the incredible movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Arab “Spring”, Idle No More, Climate Strikes and Women’s Marches. There have been moments when streets were filled with people for as far as the eye could see for days on end in Hong Kong, Santiago, Cairo, Khartoum, Algiers, Port au Prince and Beirut.
Importantly, in so many of these protests, the demands for change have been led by women and young people and have been fueled both on the streets and over social media. In fact the battle lines are increasingly digital, with repressive governments curtailing internet access[186] and shutting down social media platforms.[187]
There has been unimaginable courage as demonstrators stood firm while police and military advanced and opened fire, in Tehran, Rangoon, Baghdad, Khartoum, Bangkok, Caracas, Cali, and Bujumbura, in Ferguson, Missouri, at farmers protests in India, and in Gaza and the West Bank. There has been immense sacrifice and suffering, and so very many lives lost.
And incredible change has been catalyzed. People power defeated a troubling new extradition law in Hong Kong, toppled Omar al-Bashir after three cruel decades of rule in Sudan,[188] forced a national reckoning around anti-Black racism in the United States following the police murder of George Floyd, and unleashed a process that will deliver a new human rights-based constitution to the people of Chile. And across Canada protests led by traditional chiefs against pipeline construction in Wet’suwet’en Territory, sparked a wave of solidarity protests in February 2020 that had resulted in unprecedented economic and political pressure in early 2020 before being overtaken and subsumed by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In fact, it is difficult to think of consequential human rights moments, times of transformation and hard-fought victories, which have not been fueled by the power of people, mobilizing, claiming rights and demanding change.
(b) The defenders
No one has taught me more, led me further or inspired my own human rights work more than the tenacious, courageous and imaginative human rights defenders, across Canada and around the world with whom I have had such good fortune to work closely over these twenty years. Sometimes we were brought together over the course of an afternoon; other times it has spanned the full two decades. While inevitably leaving dozens, in fact hundreds, of names out; there is no more powerful way to lift up the central role and power of human rights defenders, than to share some of their names and work.
Soeur Marie fearlessly driving her 4X4 to reach villages cut off by conflict in Guinea’s Parrots Beak region; Cindy, unrelenting in her demands for equality for First Nations children in Canada; Celine weaving anywhere and everywhere on her motorcycle bringing support to isolated women at risk of violence in N’Djamena, Chad; Clementine always ready to listen and meet the needs of displaced communities in western Cote d’Ivoire; Abdullah, Maher, Ahmad, Muayyed, Omar and Hassan, whose pursuit for justice for Canada’s role in their torture and other human rights violations was propelled by their insistence it not happen to others; Judy steadfast in defending the land and the waters at Grassy Nations First Nation; Luis Fernando’s tireless efforts to advance respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples in Colombia; and Leilani, Bruce, Shelagh and Kathy’s determination to strengthen the protection of international human rights in Canada.
Violah continuing to champion labour rights even while she herself was forced into hiding in Zimbabwe; Pierre Claver firm and unshakeable in speaking the truth about human rights to any and all in power in Burundi; Mohamedou getting word out about torture and other abuses even while still detained in the lawlessness of Guantánamo Bay; Connie, Bev, Helen, Ellen, Viviane, Muriel, Pam, Giselle, Bridget, Darlene, Delilah, Melanie, Widia, Melissa, Brenda and countless other fierce Indigenous women who have raised awareness and pressed for an end to violence against Indigenous women and girls from all corners of Canada; Ruth, Anthony, Margaret and other lawyers working to confront anti-Black racism in the Canadian justice system; and Leila’s eloquence in spearheading a campaign for justice for her husband and twelve other men disappeared in military custody in Mauritania.
Alfred, felled by ill-health but whose journalistic voice could not be silenced by either Sudanese or South Sudanese governments; Angel passionately defending the rights of the Garifuna people and the environment in Honduras; Marie still speaking out about human rights concerns in Chad after being forced to flee as a refugee into Cameroon; Brenda so tireless in the campaign for justice for her brother Hector and the tens of thousands of disappeared in Mexico; Maurice’s courageous defence of LGBTQI+ rights in Jamaica, Canada and worldwide; Blaise turning to the radio airwaves to spread the word about rights and justice in Chad; Sr. Maudilia bringing together Indigenous rights, human rights and the environment in campaigning for mining justice in Guatemala; Steve and Bonnie’s conviction in using international norms to advance disability rights in Canada; and Cathy taking the struggle against homelessness to the streets of Toronto.
Guillaume, the schoolteacher who said he was sure that “Amnesty would show up” and then provided us with names of dozens of people killed and injured in the remote village of Sago in Cote d’Ivoire; Chief Roland, so clear and unwavering in resisting the Site C dam and destruction of the territory of his West Moberly First Nation; Monia, a clarion voice for justice for her husband Maher and for the vital importance of human rights in the fearful days following September 11th; Angelica, Luis and others who valiantly pressed on in Canadian courts against mining companies responsible for abuses in Guatemala; Elsa, who always found the time and energy needed to defend the rights of Eritreans; Amanda and so many other activists’ courage in bringing the campaign for trans rights to Parliament Hill; the tenacious women of Argentina, Ireland and Chile who have worked tirelessly to overturn full abortion bans; Nicole and the rest of the Al Otro Lado team so resolute in bringing human rights to the US/Mexico border; and Rashid rushing on his motorbike to document the impact of unrelenting aerial bombardment in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.
Isabel’s courage in exposing the widespread harms of the Canada-backed Hidroituango dam in Colombia; Paul, Justin, Michael, Dennis, Marlys, Barb, Chantal, Jamie, Laila, Sarah, Lorne, Andrew, Erin, Vanessa, Matt, Amanda and so many other Canadian lawyers who give their brilliance and their time to advancing human rights in court; Naser’s passionate efforts to defend human rights in Bahrain and press for an end to torture even as his own health rapidly declined; Sister Helen’s outrage and passion in working against the death penalty in the United States, one life at a time; Mohamed organizing a Rohingya rights organization in the refugee camps in Bangladesh for the simple reason that “we have rights”; and Chemi, Gloria, Mehmet, Cherie, Sheng, Xun, Sherap, Cheuk, Carole, Grace, Kayum, Avvy, Winnie, Rukiya and other defenders who persevere despite being targeted, in Canada, for daring to speak out about human rights concerns in China.
You have carried the struggle for human rights on your shoulders. You have won great victories and so often paid such a terrible price. You have taught and inspired me immeasurably.
The Human Rights Defenders Declaration makes it abundantly clear:
Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to promote and to strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedom…[189]
Our collective responsibility lies in sparing no effort to uphold and safeguard that essential right at every turn.
(8) Believe in rights
Human rights have taken us far; taken us far certainly since 58 countries came together at the United Nations in 1948 to adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and taken us far over the twenty years I served as Secretary General. And reinvigorated and reimagined, human rights will take us far yet. For there is certainly still so very far to go. In fact, the finish line (if there is such a thing in the struggle for human rights) often feels as if it keeps moving down the track.
Progress has come when states have overcome politics and self-interest and committed to some of the imperatives discussed in these reflections, for instance by prioritizing, embracing, equalizing and enforcing rights. Progress has certainly come through the momentum generated as individuals and communities claim rights and social movements and activists defend rights.
But in many ways, human rights achievements have been most meaningful when sustained by an unshakeable belief in human rights. I have witnessed and experienced that so many times, in personal exchanges or as I have been swept up in a campaign or a movement.
(a) Believing is solidarity
Believing in rights is the essence of what human rights solidarity represents. In 2002 I was honoured to bring 17 colourful eye-catching quilts, made up of 1360 patches of beautiful artwork and heartfelt messages of rights and justice from people across Canada, to frontline human rights organizations in Colombia. The presentation of the quilts became the unexpected centrepiece of a major event in Colombia’s palatial Congreso, with the Vice President and a phalanx of all national media outlets in attendance.[190]
But what truly mattered was not the glitz of the setting or the prestige of who was in attendance. It was the deep sense of connection and solidarity that came with each quilt. They were displayed prominently in the offices of human rights groups or homes of activists, not because they were stirring works of art (which they were) but because they were imbued with a sense of protection, which was all about the belief in human rights. Years later colleagues have returned to Canada from visits to Colombia sharing accounts of having seen one of these quilts, still having pride of place.
And in 2018, that same forceful connection across thousands of kilometres was carried by hundreds of paper butterflies, again festooned with captivating designs and beautiful human rights messages from across Canada. We brought the butterflies to Mexico (symbolic of the epic migration of the monarch butterfly between our two countries) and to families of the disappeared and organizations working to support their courageous campaign for answers and accountability.[191] Two years later a photograph made its way back to us from the Center for Women’s Human Rights in Chihuahua,[192] with butterflies still taped to the wall, in full flight towards a vision of safety and equality, a flight clearly propelled by a belief in human rights.
(b) Believing in words on paper
How many times I have turned a corner, sat down to meet with a government minister, gathered around a table in a human rights organization’s office, or sat down to talk in someone’s home and looked up or looked around and seen the Universal Declaration pinned on a bulletin board or an Amnesty International report being passed around.
I remember a framed version of the Universal Declaration hanging beside the door of the room in which we were interviewing prisoners in Ruyigi, Burundi, and also taped to a sheet dividing the small space of a Rohingya refugee family’s home in Bangladesh.
While travelling through conflict-ridden and isolated parts of eastern Chad in 2006 we came upon a group of elders, displaced from a village that had been attacked a few months earlier, who were sitting under a tree reading an Arabic translation of a recent Amnesty report describing that attack.[193] Similarly in Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, we had arrived with a box full of copies of the most recent Amnesty report documenting grave human rights violations associated with the country’s volatile 2010 presidential election, which were distributed and shared so quickly and widely that we kept crossing paths with well-thumbed copies in every village we visited throughout the west of the country.[194]
On a subsequent trip to eastern Chad in 2010, I had a powerful and entirely unexpected reunion with Abakar Yusuf, who in 2006 had provided me with wrenching details of the attack on the village of Koloy, of which he was the chief. His wife had been killed in that attack, only days before I met Abakar. He and several hundred people from other villages in that area had been forced to flee and had taken shelter out in the open in Adé, the largest village in the area. Abakar’s account was so compelling that along with his photo it was prominently included in the report we wrote at that time. That report became the basis for a number of subsequent trips I made to New York to meet with members of the UN Security Council in an effort to convince them to agree to deploy a peacekeeping mission to the region. I began every one of those meetings by sharing Abakar’s story.
I had never thought I would encounter Abakar – who had no means of communication and certainly no home when we met in 2006 – again. But four years later, we serendipitously found each other in an internally displaced persons camp in Koudigou.[195] I did not have a copy of the report[196] to give to him but had a version on my laptop that I could show him, and was also able to share accounts of the Security Council meetings which had, ultimately, been a key factor leading to the decision in September 2007 to establish MINURCAT (United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad),[197] meetings in which he figured prominently. I made arrangements with local UN officials to ensure Abakar received a paper copy of the report. Abakar’s pride and satisfaction were evident. His parting words to me were to note that we had been able to accomplish a great deal together, but that there was clearly still much more to do.
(c) Believing in names
Human rights work is enormous and all-encompassing, dominated by reports of hundreds, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of people experiencing grave human rights violations. Some of the most important moments for me have been the reminders that those millions of people experience those violations one person at a time.
In March 2001, at the end of a long day of interviews of refugees from Sierra Leone who had been displaced by attacks against them by Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces who had crossed over into Guinea,[198] I met 60 year-old Mabinte Banguru. Three years earlier, she fled Sierra Leone after her husband was shot in the back by RUF fighters. A month earlier, having fled a besieged refugee camp in southeastern Guinea, she watched and wept helplessly as those same rebels abducted her 15-year-old daughter and mercilessly assaulted her 17-year-old son. She had had no news of her daughter, but feared the worse, knowing only too well the RUF’s record of rape, mutilation and murder.
I asked Mabinte for the names of her family members. She readily gave me her children’s names. She then paused and was silent. Obviously emotional, she exchanged words with our interpreter. He told me she was finding it difficult to say her husband’s name, because she had not spoken it aloud for several years. And then she did.
Backarie Mambu. I felt that she had kept his name to herself so that she would not forget -- but that she was now passing his name to me because she believed that would help ensure he would not be forgotten. Backarie Mambu.
In November 2006 our Amnesty International team in eastern Chad came upon the ruins of the village of Djorlo, which had been attacked and razed to the ground days before our arrival, forcing the hundreds of people for whom the village was home to flee. Two days later we came upon the survivors of that attack, around 100 kilometres from Djorlo, living precariously in an open field. We sat with the people of Djorlo as they provided details of the horrific attack, which had included several incidents of rape and of elderly people and children being burned alive in their huts. 40 people had died in the attack. I sat with village elders as they provided me with names and details of those who had been killed. My notebook filled quickly and we soon reached 39 names, and then we stopped.
I asked about the 40th name. There was a great deal of discussion and consultations with others who had not been part of our conversation. People reviewed the names in my notes and I was asked to read them out several times. There was a growing sense of agitation and distress, and I was certainly concerned that increased stress was the last thing that the people of Djorlo needed at such a difficult time. I verified if they were certain that 40 people had died in the attack; they were. I made it clear that it did not matter if we were missing one of the names; but that did not ease their anxiousness.
And then I was notified that the final name had been remembered. Rather than simply being told that name by whoever had remembered it, I was asked to reassemble with the elders, under the largest tree in the area. Only once we were all seated did one of the men speak his name: Haroon Yacoub.
And there was so much in that fleeting moment of Haroon Yacoub’s name being spoken. It was not the fact that Haroon had been killed that was the point, but rather it was affirming that he had lived and would long be cherished and remembered for that life. And that his name was being spoken to me and through me and Amnesty, to the world, because they believed that would both lift him up and serve the people of Djorlo.
I have written Haroon Yacoub’s name on a piece of paper that I quietly slip into the back of my new annual agenda every January 1st, which is then carried with me everywhere. It has become worn, faded and a bit smudged over the years since, but a very simple reminder of the essential truth that believing that every life lived matters, deeply, is the very core of universal human rights.
(d) Believing in the future
If anything is clear as I wrap up these reflections it is the ups and downs, and give and take of the human rights struggle over these twenty years. The same would almost certainly be said for any period of time. And despite the setbacks, disappointment and tragedies, a fundamental belief in both the potential and the power of human rights does prevail. That is so very evident when we consider the degree to which strong human rights movements have coalesced around the many overarching and urgent concerns we face globally today, such as the rise of hate and misinformation, the climate crisis, the challenges of new technology and the digital sphere, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Intuitively and often passionately, people look to human rights for solutions and frameworks that chart a path forward.
(i) Believe that we can overcome hate
In the face of hateful politics from leaders such as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro, the rapid rise of online hate and violence, often targeted at women, LGBTIQ+ individuals, and racialized communities, and the efforts of many public figures to vilify the media and promote misinformation, human rights groups have rallied.
But of course, hate extends far beyond the ugly political agendas of opportunistic and racist politicians, it permeates society. As I write, Canadians are confronting another wrenching instance of anti-Muslim hate. On 6 June, 2021, five members of the Afzaal family were deliberated targeted in a racist and very likely terrorist attack in London, Ontario when a speeding truck was deliberately driven into them as they were out for an evening stroll. Four family members died and only their 9-year-old son survived. Four years earlier a gunman opened fire at a Quebec City mosque, killing six worshippers and injuring five others. Hate is real in Canada, and it kills. We must believe that it can be overcome.
(ii) Believe that we can save the climate
Recognizing that the existential crisis posed by the climate crisis is entirely about human rights, in its origins, manifestations and impact, there has been an unprecedented mobilization bringing together environmental and human rights movements. After all, as the former global Secretary General of Amnesty International, Kumi Naidoo, frequently remarked, “there are no human rights on a dead planet”.[199]
(iii) Believe that we can curtail technology’s harms
Human rights groups and defenders have rapidly embraced the many tangible benefits that new information technologies, digital platforms and social media channels provide in human rights research, activism, mobilization and awareness-building. I certainly have. It has however been a fraught relationship, increasingly so. For every benefit, it often seems that an area of concern emerges. It has become abundantly clear that technology poses both direct and insidious risks to a wide range of human rights, including racism, sexism and discrimination, the right to life and protections against torture and ill-treatment, freedom of movement, free expression, and certainly privacy. Be it the direct risk of new automated weapons or the less visible but gravely serious impacts of facial recognition and other artificial intelligence innovations, human rights researchers and campaigners who draw upon the considerable benefits of technology in their work bring that energy and scrutiny to efforts to curtail technology’s many human rights harms.[200]
(iv) Believe that we can build back for human rights
And now there is COVID-19. As the scale and implications of the pandemic became clear in early 2020, it was immediately evident that all aspects of the crisis – of both the public health and economic dimensions – were rooted in human rights. And equally, it was clear that the solutions, particularly the growing interest in ensuring that recovery from the pandemic would lead to transformative societal change, were human rights solutions. As such, there has been tremendous mobilization around initiatives focused on “building back better,”[201] a “green recovery,”[202] and a “people’s vaccine”.[203]
But leaders, even when pursuing commendable programs and announcing substantial funding, have failed deliberately and explicitly to ground their efforts in the frameworks of equality and accountability that come with a human rights approach. And 18 months into the crisis, the inexcusable disparities laid bare in the inequalities and vulnerabilities from neighbourhood to neighbourhood and community to community in Canada, and from country to country and region to region globally, remain raw and grim. People believed that human rights must guide all aspects of responding to COVID-19. Governments unfortunately have so far failed to embrace that same belief, to our collective detriment.
(9) Final Words
I met Violah, a labour organizer and opposition politician, while she was in hiding during a volatile and fearful time in Zimbabwe in 2004. She was at great personal risk, and living apart from her family, simply because she was a determined human rights defender. But despite that peril, she was still determined to lend her support to others. I asked her why and how she found that determination, particularly given the very real dangers faced by her and her family.
Her response has stayed with me ever since: if not me, who?
Prior to these eventful twenty years, there was a momentous evening (for me at least), 36 years ago. I was in my first year of law school at Dalhousie University in Halifax and I saw an intriguing notice on a student bulletin board giving details about the monthly meeting of the Halifax Amnesty International group. I went, and never looked back. Two compelling impressions remain with me from that evening.
First, the inspiring and welcoming Amnesty members I met were of all ages, backgrounds and interests, and from many different corners of the world; but were all united in a common sense of purpose and possibility. It was the evening I first heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and our shared responsibility to uphold it.
Second, as a young activist I was energized by Amnesty’s “be the change” message. Yes, it is a world full of deeply entrenched cruelty and injustice (then as now), which can readily seem insurmountable (then as now). But here is one step to take, one letter to write - right now - to begin to make a difference. It was empowering in 1985 and certainly has powerful and necessary resonance in 2021. I wrote my first Amnesty letter that night, on behalf of a law student named Beatriz who had been forcibly disappeared in El Salvador.
And I come back to Violah’s words, if not me, which readily extend to, if not us, who? That invites one final reflection, which is my profound appreciation and admiration for the incredible people who make up the Amnesty International movement, in Canada and everywhere. We have climbed upon each other’s shoulders. We have followed in one another’s footsteps. We have held hands. If not us, who?
These are not easy times for human rights. But just as I did at that first Amnesty International meeting 36 years ago; as I was reminded in Violah’s words; and as was so apparent when the International Criminal Court was established and the Arms Trade Treaty adopted, when transgender rights were enshrined in Canadian law, when abortion bans were overturned in Argentina, Ireland and Chile, when MINURCAT was deployed in eastern Chad, when Bashir and Homa were freed in Ethiopia and Iran, when Derek Chauvin was convicted for murdering George Floyd, when Syrian refugees were welcomed in Germany and Canada, when Maher, Abdullah, Ahmad, Muayyed and Omar were compensated for Canada’s role in their torture and other abuses, and when the courage and leadership of Indigenous peoples forced Canadians to confront who we are as a nation, I look around and see hope and possibility. And I know that my successor, Ketty Niyabandi, will provide the vision and leadership that is needed.
That collective determination will take us far. As it must. And it is all about human rights.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Alex Neve served as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada from January 1, 2000 until September 30, 2020. He is presently a Senior Fellow with the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and adjunct professor teaching international human rights law at the law faculties of Dalhousie University and the University of Ottawa. This article was written in June 2021 and has only been slightly updated since then.
[2] Alex Neve, Israel, Palestine and Canada: The true measure of ‘friendship’?, 16 May, 2021, https://www.alexneve.ca/blog/israel-palestine-and-canada-the-true-measure-of-friendship.
[3] Steven Chase, Trudeau urged to end arms exports to Saudi Arabia after Canada cited for fueling Yemen war, Globe and Mail, 17 September, 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-trudeau-urged-to-end-arms-exports-to-saudi-arabia-after-canada-cited/.
[4] Global Affairs Canada, Final report: Review of export permits to Saudi Arabia, https://www.international.gc.ca/trade-commerce/controls-controles/memo/annex-a-ksa.aspx?lang=eng.
[5] Ahmed Abdelkader Elpannann, Why is Canada ignoring the horrendous human-rights violations in Egypt?, National Post, 3 July, 2018, https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-is-canada-ignoring-the-horrendous-human-rights-violations-in-egypt.
[6] Geoffrey Cameron, Multilateralism holds Iran to account for human-rights abuses, Policy Options, 7 December, 2020, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/december-2020/multilateralism-holds-iran-to-account-for-human-rights-abuses/.
[7] Global Affairs Canada, Canada imposes new sanctions on individuals and entities involved in illegal annexation of Crimea, 29 March, 2021, https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2021/03/canada-imposes-new-sanctions-on-individuals-and-entities-involved-in-illegal-annexation-of-crimea.html.
[8] CBC News, Trudeau considering further sanctions on Belarus as regime announces Ottawa embassy closure, 25 May, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-belarus-sanctions-embassy-closure-1.6039743.
[9] The Honourable Bob Rae, Special Envoy to Myanmar, “Tell them we’re human” What Canada and the world can do about the Rohingya crisis, https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/rep_sem-rap_esm.aspx?lang=eng.
[10] Global Affairs Canada, Canada imposes additional sanctions on individuals and entities affiliated with Armed Forces of Myanmar, 17 May, 2021, https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2021/05/canada-imposes-additional-sanctions-on-individuals-and-entities-affiliated-with-armed-forces-of-myanmar.html.
[11] Statement from the Lima Group, 5 January, 2021, https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_relations-relations_internationales/latin_america-amerique_latine/2021-01-05-lima_group-groupe_lima.aspx?lang=eng.
[12] https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/825438460265762816
[13] See “Refugees, migrants and the borders of human rights”, Section 5(c), Infra.
[14] Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, concluded on 7 July, 1999, UN Security Council Document S/1999/777. Available at: https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/SL_990707_LomePeaceAgreement.pdf.
[15] Ibid., article IX(2).
[16] United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, established by the UN Security Council on 22 October, 1999, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/unamsil/.
[17] Interview, Katkama Transit Camp, Guéckédou, Guinea, 24 March, 2001.
[18] Lansana Gberie, The Special Court for Sierra Leone rests – for good, April 2014, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2014/special-court-sierra-leone-rests-%E2%80%93-good.
[19] About the Court: facts and figures, https://www.icc-cpi.int/about.
[20] Amnesty International, Canada: End Impunity through Universal Jurisdiction, AMR 20/2287/2020, June 2020,
https://www.amnesty.ca/sites/default/files/AI%20No%20Safe%20Haven%20Report%20-%20FINAL.pdf.
[21] Désiré Munyaneza was sentenced to a life prison term in 2009 and Jacques Mungwarere was acquitted in 2013, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/wc-cdg/succ-real.html.
[22] RCMP charges Syrian officer in Maher Arar torture case, CBC News, 1 September, 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/maher-arar-rendition-development-rcmp-1.3211088.
[23] Guantánamo Bay’s litany of human rights violations and degrading treatment is powerfully catalogued in numerous articles, memoirs, books and film, including from Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, an account of his fifteen years of unlawful detention, extensive torture and other human rights abuse in Jordan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.
[24] Amnesty International, “Like we were enemies in a war”, China’s Mass Internment, Torture and Persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang, ASA 17/4137/2021, 10 June, 2021, https://xinjiang.amnesty.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ASA_17_4137-2021_Full_report_ENG.pdf.
[25] Newlines Institute, The Uyghur Genocide: An Examination of China’s Breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention, 8 March, 2021, https://newlinesinstitute.org/uyghurs/the-uyghur-genocide-an-examination-of-chinas-breaches-of-the-1948-genocide-convention/.
[26] Parliament declares China is conducting genocide against its Muslim minorities, Globe and Mail, 22 February, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-parliament-declares-china-is-conducting-genocide-against-its-muslim/.
[27] Amnesty International, Israel/ OPT: End brutal repression of Palestinians protesting forced displacement in occupied East Jerusalem, 10 May, 2021, https://www.amnesty.ca/news/israel-opt-end-brutal-repression-palestinians-protesting-forced-displacement-occupied-east.
[28] Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, 27 April, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution.
[29] Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/maher_arar/06-09-18/www.ararcommission.ca/eng/26.html; and Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/lbrr/archives/cn73612699-eng.pdf.
[30] Independent Review of the Extradition of Dr. Hassan Diab, https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/ext/01/toc-tdm.html.
[31] The Supreme Court of Canada heard three separate appeals with respect to Omar Khadr, in 2008, 2010 and 2015; and three separate appeals dealing with immigration security certificates in the cases of Adil Charkaoui, Hassan Almrei and Mohamed Harkat.
[32] Minister of National Defence Gordon O’Connor was shuffled out of his post in August 2007, likely in large part due to controversy about his handling of the Afghan prisoner affair, which at one point had required him to apologize for misleading the House of Commons, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/mackay-named-new-defence-minister-in-cabinet-shuffle-1.635184.
[33] Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament for the first two months of 2010 was largely seen as an attempt to diffuse a growing constitutional crisis related to his government’s handling of the Afghan prisoner situation, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pm-shuts-down-parliament-until-march-1.829800.
[34] Serious concerns about Canada’s laws, policies, practices, investigations, legal proceedings and complicity in overseas human rights violations with respect to these cases were taken up, sometimes on several different occasions, by among others, the UN’s Human Rights Committee, Committee against Torture, Committee on the Rights of the Child, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.
[35] Settlements have been reached with respect to the cases of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, Muayyed Nureddin, Omar Khadr and Benamar Benatta. Lawsuits are still pending with respect to several other cases.
[36] Amnesty International, Human Rights Principles for Companies, AI Index: ACT 70/01/98, January, 1998, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act70/001/1998/en/.
[37] Secretary-General proposes Global Compact on human rights, labour, environment, in address to World Economic Forum in Davos, UN Press Release SG/SM/6881, 1 February, 1999, https://www.un.org/press/en/1999/19990201.sgsm6881.html.
[38] https://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/globalization/business/docs/nexen3.pdf.
[39] Amnesty International, Sudan: The human price of oil, AI Index: AFR 54/001/2000, 2 May, 2000, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr54/001/2000/en/.
[40] Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December, 1948, final preambular paragraph.
[41] Report of the Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises on its mission to Canada, UN Doc. A/HRC/38/48/Add.1, 23 April, 2018, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/116/38/PDF/G1811638.pdf?OpenElement.
[42] Nevsun Resources Ltd. v Araya, 2020 SCC 5, https://decisions.scc-csc.ca/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/18169/index.do; Garcia v. Tahoe Resources Inc., 2017 BCCA 39, https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/ca/17/00/2017BCCA0039.htm; Choc v. Hudbay Minerals Inc., 2013 ONSC 1414, https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2013/2013onsc1414/2013onsc1414.html.
[43] Bill C-300, An Act respecting Corporate Accountability for the Activities of Mining, Oil or Gas in Developing Countries, https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Bill=C300&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=3.
[44] The Government of Canada brings leadership to responsible business conduct abroad, 17 January, 2018, https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2018/01/the_government_ofcanadabringsleadershiptoresponsiblebusinesscond.html.
[45] Canadian Human Rights Ombud launches online complaint process as key part of global mandate to protect rights, 15 March, 2021, https://core-ombuds.canada.ca/core_ombuds-ocre_ombuds/news-nouvelles/complaint_process-processus_de_plainte.aspx?lang=eng.
[46] Jeff Sallot, Chrétien too timid on human rights, activists say, Globe and Mail, 14 February, 2001, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/chretien-too-timid-on-human-rights-activists-say/article1030171/.
[47] Agreement Concerning Annual Reports on Human Rights and Free Trade Between Canada and the Republic of Colombia, 27 May, 2010, https://www.treaty-accord.gc.ca/text-texte.aspx?id=105278&_ga=2.67185745.1543474294.1622753244-907972199.1622753244.
[48] https://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/colombia-colombie/bilateral_relations_bilaterales/hrft-co_2012-dple.aspx?lang=eng.
[49] Citing grave concerns, Amnesty International Canada withdraws from reporting process on Human Rights and Free Trade between Canada and Colombia, 20 March, 2018, https://www.amnesty.ca/news/citing-grave-concerns-amnesty-international-canada-withdraws-reporting-process-human-rights-and
[50] Annual Report Pursuant to the Agreement Concerning Annual Reports on Human Rights and Free Trade between Canada and the Republic of Colombia For the period January 1, 2019 to December 31, 2019, https://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/colombia-colombie/bilateral_relations_bilaterales/rep-hrft-co_2019-dple-rapp.aspx?lang=eng.
[51] Michael Lynk and Alex Neve, Canada’s updated trade agreement with Israel violates international law, 29 May, 2019, https://theconversation.com/canadas-updated-trade-agreement-with-israel-violates-international-law-117547.
[52] Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director, We must have a #PeoplesVaccine, not a profit vaccine, 9 December, 2020, https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2020/december/20201209_we-must-have-a-peoples-vaccine.
[53] Global Justice Now, 69 of the richest 100 entities on the planet are corporations, not governments, figures show, 17 October, 2018, https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/news/69-richest-100-entities-planet-are-corporations-not-governments-figures-show/.
[54] Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, adopted by the World Conference on Human Rights, 25 June 1993, article 5: https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/vienna.aspx.
[55] Toussaint v. Canada (Attorney General), 2011 FCA 213, https://canlii.ca/t/fm4v6.
[56] Tanudjaja v. Canada (Attorney General), 2014 ONCA 852, https://canlii.ca/t/gffz5.
[57] A call for human rights oversight of government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, 14 April, 2020, https://www.amnesty.ca/news/canada-301-organizations-academics-and-others-urge-governments-adopt-human-rights-oversight.
[58] Tanudjaja, Supra, footnote 56.
[59] National Housing Strategy Act, S.C. 2019, c. 29, s. 313.
[60] Amnesty International, Canada: Why there must be a public inquiry into the police killing of Dudley George, AI Index: AMR 20/002/2003, September, 2003, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr20/002/2003/en/.
[61] CBC News, Human rights group calls for Saskatoon police probe, 10 June, 2003, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/human-rights-group-calls-for-saskatoon-police-probe-1.405728.
[62] Amnesty International, Canada: “Time is wasting”: Respect for the land rights of the Lubicon Cree long overdue, AI Index: AMR 20/001/2003, April, 2003, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr20/001/2003/en/.
[63] Amnesty International, Stolen Sisters: A human rights response to discrimination and violence against Indigenous women in Canada, AI Index: AMR 20/003/2004, October, 2004, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr20/003/2004/en/.
[64] Alex Boutilier, Native teen’s slaying a ‘crime,’ not a ‘sociological phenomenon,’ Stephen Harper says, Toronto Star, 21 August, 2014, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/08/21/native_teens_slaying_a_crime_not_a_sociological_phenomenon_stephen_harper_says.html.
[65] Report of the Ipperwash Inquiry, May, 2007, http://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/inquiries/ipperwash/index.html.
[66] Legacy of Hope: An Agenda for Change, Final Report from the Commission on First Nations and Métis Peoples and Justice Reform, 21 June, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/20120507043247/http://www.justice.gov.sk.ca/justicereform/volume1.shtml.
[67] Amnesty International, Canada: 20 years’ denial of recommendations made by the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the continuing impact on the Lubicon Cree, AI Index: AMR 20/003/2010, March, 2010, https://www.amnesty.ca/sites/default/files/2010-03-17amr200032010en20yearsdeniallubicon.pdf.
[68] Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in British Columbia, Canada, 21 December, 2014, https://www.oas.org/en/iachr/reports/pdfs/indigenous-women-bc-canada-en.pdf.
[69] Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Report of the inquiry concerning Canada of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women under article 8 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, UN Doc. CEDAW/C/OP.8/CAN/1, 30 March, 2015, https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CEDAW%2fC%2fOP.8%2fCAN%2f1&Lang=en.
[70] Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 3 June, 2019, https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/final-report/.
[71] A Legal Analysis of Genocide, 3 June, 2019, Supplementary Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Supplementary-Report_Genocide.pdf.
[72] Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2 June, 2015, http://www.trc.ca/assets/pdf/Executive_Summary_English_Web.pdf.
[73] CBC News, Canada endorses indigenous rights declaration, 12 November, 2010, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-endorses-indigenous-rights-declaration-1.964779.
[74] Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, Canada Becomes a Full Supporter of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 10 May, 2016, https://www.canada.ca/en/indigenous-northern-affairs/news/2016/05/canada-becomes-a-full-supporter-of-the-united-nations-declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html.
[75]Bill C-262, An Act to ensure that the laws of Canada are in harmony with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, introduced in the House of Commons on 21 April, 2016, https://parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-262/third-reading.
[76] CBC News, Liberal government backs bill that demands full implementation of UN Indigenous rights declaration, 21 November, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/wilson-raybould-backs-undrip-bill-1.4412037.
[77] Bill C-15, An Act respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/BillDetails.aspx?Language=E&billId=11007812.
[78] Alex Neve and Allan Rock, 215 reasons to make up for decades of failure toward Indigenous People, 2 June, 2021, https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/neve-and-rock-215-reasons-for-transformative-change.
[79] Kristy Kirkup, No indication Canada will withdraw application for judicial review of human-rights tribunal orders, says Cindy Blackstock, Globe and Mail, 8 June, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-no-indication-canada-will-withdraw-application-for-judicial-review-of/. NOTE: before this article was published a landmark deal was reached to provide $40 billion in funds towards compensation and reform of the child welfare system. Carrie Tait, Kristy Kirkup and Menaka Raman-Wilms, Ottawa reaches $40-billion deal with First Nations over child welfare, Globe and Mail, 3 January, 2022, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-ottawa-reaches-40-billion-deal-with-first-nations-over-child-welfare/.
[80] Tanya Talaga, It’s time to bring our children home from the residential schools, Globe and Mail, 31 May, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-survivors-of-residential-schools-share-their-stories-call-on-the/.
[81] Vienna Declaration, Supra, footnote 54.
[82] Amnesty International, Stop Violence against Women: 'It's in our hands', AI Index: ACT 77/001/2004, 5 March, 2004, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ACT77/001/2004/en/.
[83] Supra, footnote 63.
[84] ‘Why Do We Deserve to Die?’ Kabul’s Hazaras Bury Their Daughters, New York Times, 9 May, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/09/world/europe/afghanistan-school-attack-hazaras.html.
[85] 10 Quebec women have been killed in 2021. Shelters to get a $92M boost, Montreal Gazette, 23 April, 2021, https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/10-quebec-women-have-been-killed-in-2021-shelters-will-get-a-92m-funding-boost.
[86] UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Situation of women human rights defenders, A/HRC/40/60, 10 January, 2019, https://undocs.org/A/HRC/40/60/
[87] https://www.unwomen.org/en.
[88] Sustainable Development Goal 5, https://sdgs.un.org/.
[89] Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN General Assembly Resolution 70/1, A/RES/70/1, 21 October, 2015, para. 20, https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E.
[90] Amnesty International, Chile: Partial decriminalization of abortion, an important win for human rights, 21 August, 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/08/chile-partial-decriminalization-of-abortion-an-important-win-for-human-rights/.
[91] Amnesty International, Ireland: One year since vote to end abortion ban, 24 May, 2019, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/05/ireland-one-year-since-vote-to-end-abortion-ban/.
[92] Amnesty International, Argentina: Legalization of abortion is an historic victory, 30 December, 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12/argentina-legalization-abortion-historic-victory/.
[93] It’s Time: Canada’s Strategy to Prevent and Address Gender-Based Violence, June 2017, https://women-gender-equality.canada.ca/en/gender-based-violence-knowledge-centre/gender-based-violence-strategy.html.
[94] CBC News, After decades of talk, national action plan to protect women finally in the works, 3 February, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/agreement-to-develop-national-action-plan-end-violence-against-women-canada-1.5898226.
[95] Supra, footnote 70.
[96] Emerald Bensadoun, ‘Half of a document’: Advocates say long-awaited federal MMIWG action plan falls short, 6 June, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/7924432/mmiwg-action-plan-falls-short/.
[97] Department of Finance Canada, Budget 2021: A Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care Plan, https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2021/04/budget-2021-a-canada-wide-early-learning-and-child-care-plan.html.
[98] Child Care Now, https://timeforchildcare.ca/.
[99] Chatelaine Magazine, The Canadian Military’s Sexual Misconduct Crisis Explained, 12 May, 2021, https://www.chatelaine.com/news/sexual-misconduct-canadian-military/.
[100]https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/priorities-priorites/policy-politique.aspx?lang=eng
[101] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/gender_equality-egalite_des_genres/cnap_wps-pnac_fps.aspx?lang=eng.
[102] https://www.amnesty.ca/our-work/issues/womens-human-rights/feminist-foreign-policy
[103] https://fcm.ca/en/about-fcm/big-city-mayors-caucus.
[104] Amnesty International, Toxic Twitter – A toxic place for women, 21 March, 2018, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/research/2018/03/online-violence-against-women-chapter-1/.
[105] Human Rights Campaign, Marriage Equality Around the World, https://www.hrc.org/resources/marriage-equality-around-the-world.
[106] Human Dignity Trust, Map of Countries that Criminalise LGBT People, https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-criminalisation/.
[107] Phil Heidenreich, Senate passes Bill C-16 which defends transgender rights, 16 June, 2017, https://globalnews.ca/news/3532824/senate-passes-bill-c-16-which-defends-transgender-rights/.
[108] TMM Update Trans Day of Remembrance 2020, 20 November, 2020, https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-tdor-2020/.
[109] NBC News, Trump's controversial transgender military policy goes into effect, 12 April, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/trump-s-controversial-transgender-military-policy-goes-effect-n993826.
[110] ABC News, Record number of state bills in 2021 impact transgender rights, advocacy group says, 12 March, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/record-number-state-bills-2021-impact-transgender-rights/story?id=76401800.
[111] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SexualOrientationGender/Pages/Index.aspx.
[112] Equal Rights Coalition, https://equalrightscoalition.org/
[113] BBC News, Germany officially recognises colonial-era Namibia genocide, 28 May, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57279008.
[114] BBC News, George Floyd: Timeline of black deaths and protests, 22 April, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52905408.
[115] Reuters, Study: Black citizens "over-represented" in Toronto police arrests, shootings, 10 August, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-race-police-idUSKCN2562SH.
[116] Anna Kirstine Schirrer, Introduction: On Reparations for Slavery and Colonialism, Journal of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, 31 July, 2020, https://polarjournal.org/2020/07/31/reparations-for-slavery-and-colonialism/.
[117] “The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.” Kevin Williamson, The Case against Reparations, National Review, 24 May, 2014, https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/05/case-against-reparations-kevin-d-williamson/.
[118] Alex Neve, Being for human rights and against racism does not, an anti-racist make, 18 May, 2021, https://www.alexneve.ca/blog/being-for-human-rights-and-against-racism-does-not-an-anti-racist-make.
[119] Interview, Maltam Refugee Camp, Cameroon, 16, May, 2008.
[120] UNHCR, Global Trends: Forced displacement in 2019, https://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2019/.
[121] Human Rights Watch, EU: Time to review and remedy cooperation policies facilitating abuse of refugees and migrants in Libya, 28 April, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/28/eu-time-review-and-remedy-cooperation-policies-facilitating-abuse-refugees-and.
[122] Kyilah Terry, The EU-Turkey Deal, Five Years On: A Frayed and Controversial but Enduring Blueprint, Migration Policy Institute, 8 April, 2021, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/eu-turkey-deal-five-years-on.
[123] The Guardian, EU urged to end cooperation with Sudan after refugees whipped and deported, 27 February, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/feb/27/eu-urged-to-end-cooperation-with-sudan-after-refugees-whipped-and-deported.
[124] Washington Post, Deal with Mexico paves way for asylum overhaul at U.S. border, 24 November, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/deal-with-mexico-paves-way-for-asylum-overhaul-at-us-border/2018/11/24/87b9570a-ef74-11e8-9236-bb94154151d2_story.html.
[125] Vox, Trump’s agreements in Central America are dismantling the asylum system as we know it, 20 November, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/9/26/20870768/trump-agreement-honduras-guatemala-el-salvador-explained.
[126] The Guardian, Germany on course to accept one million refugees in 2015, 8 December, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/08/germany-on-course-to-accept-one-million-refugees-in-2015.
[127] UNHCR, Canada’s 2016 record high level of resettlement praised by UNHCR, 24 April, 2017, https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2017/4/58fe15464/canadas-2016-record-high-level-resettlement-praised-unhcr.html.
[128] Canadian Council for Refugees, The Resettlement of Indochinese Refugees in Canada: Looking Back after Twenty Years, https://ccrweb.ca/sites/ccrweb.ca/files/static-files/20thann.html.
[129] Alex Neve, The Bogus Rhetoric about Bogus Refugees, Slaw: Canada’s Online Legal Magazine, 21 March, 2014, http://www.slaw.ca/2014/03/21/the-bogus-rhetoric-about-bogus-refugees/
[130] Canadian Doctors for Refugee Care v. Canada (Attorney general), 2014 FC 651, https://reports.fja-cmf.gc.ca/fja-cmf/j/en/item/332648/index.do.
[131] CBC News, Liberal government fully restores refugee health care program, 18 February, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mcallum-philpott-interim-federal-health-program-refugees-1.3453397
[132] For an overview of the history of the Safe Third Country Agreement and links to Federal Court and Federal Court of Appeal rulings, see: Alex Neve, Canada’s Obsession with Shutting Down the 49th Parallel to Refugees, (2021), 5 PKI Global Justice Journal 17, https://globaljustice.queenslaw.ca/news/canadas-obsession-with-shutting-down-the-49th-parallel-to-refugees. NOTE: The Supreme Court granted leave to appeal on 16 December, 2021, Amnesty International, Supreme Court decision to hear Safe Third Country Agreement appeal is a promising step for refugee rights, 16 December, 2021, https://www.amnesty.ca/news/supreme-court-decision-to-hear-safe-third-country-agreement-appeal-is-a-promising-step-for-refugee-rights/.
[133] Globe and Mail, Video: 'A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian': Harper, Trudeau spar over right to revoke citizenship, 28 September, 2015, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/video-video-a-canadian-is-a-canadian-is-a-canadian-harper-trudeau-spar/.
[134] Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Changes to the Citizenship Act as a Result of Bill C-6, https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/2017/10/changes_to_the_citizenshipactasaresultofbillc-6.html.
[135] Following resolution of the Meng Wanzhou extradition case, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were released from detention in China, and returned to Canada on 25 September, 2021.
[136] https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/human_rights-droits_homme/arbitrary_detention-detention_arbitraire.aspx?lang=eng.
[137] Hannah Jackson, ‘Human beings are not bartering chips’: Biden calls for China to release 2 Michaels, Global News, 23 February, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/7658174/biden-trudeau-1st-bilateral-meeting/.
[138] Robert Fife and Steven Chase, Canada held secret U.S. talks in bid to free Kovrig, Spavor jailed in China, Globe and Mail, 7 June, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canada-held-secret-us-talks-in-bid-to-free-kovrig-spavor-jailed-in/
[139] Global National, The case of Huseyin Celil, the Canadian man jailed in China for 15 years, 7 May, 2021, https://globalnews.ca/video/7844743/the-case-of-huseyin-celil-the-canadian-man-jailed-in-china-for-15-years.
[140] Josh Elliot, Wife of Canadian citizen jailed 13 years in China fears he’s been ‘forgotten’ amid Huawei crisis, 24 January, 2019, https://globalnews.ca/news/4874245/canadian-detained-china-huseyin-celil/.
[141] Robert Fife and Steven Chase, Foreign Minister corrects Canadian envoy to China on imprisoned citizen, Globe and Mail, 6 February, 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-foreign-minister-corrects-canadian-envoy-to-china-on-imprisoned/.
[142] https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/43-2/CACN/meeting-28/evidence.
[143] Thomas Walkom, Why Stephen Harper’s Conservatives won’t give Omar Khadr a break, Toronto Star, 24 April, 2015, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/04/24/why-stephen-harpers-conservatives-wont-give-omar-khadr-a-break-walkom.html.
[144] Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar, https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/206/301/pco-bcp/commissions/maher_arar/07-09-13/www.ararcommission.ca/eng/index.htm; Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2014/bcp-pco/CP32-90-2008-1-eng.pdf.
[145] Steven Chase, Ottawa has spent $9.3-million fighting legal claims over Canadian’s alleged torture in Sudan, Globe and Mail, 15 February, 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-ottawa-has-spent-93-million-fighting-legal-claims-over-canadians/.
[146] Alex Neve, The Hassan Diab Case: Injustice expands, need for redress and reform deepens, (2021), 5 PKI Global Justice Journal 4.
[147] Human Rights Watch, “Bring Me Back to Canada”: Plight of Canadians Held in Northeast Syria for Alleged ISIS Links, 29 June, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/06/29/bring-me-back-canada/plight-canadians-held-northeast-syria-alleged-isis-links.
[148] CBC News, Homa Hoodfar, Concordia professor, released from Tehran jail, 26 September, 2016, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/homa-hoodfar-released-evin-prison-1.3778874.
[149] David Child, Canadians call for return of relative held in Ethiopia, Al Jazeera, 23 February, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/2/23/canadians-call-for-return-of-relative-held-in-ethiopia.
[150] Alex Ballingall, Canadian freed after 11 years in an Ethiopian jail calls for inquiry into Ottawa’s response, 22 May, 2018, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/05/22/canadian-freed-after-11-years-in-an-ethiopian-jail-calls-for-inquiry-into-ottawas-response.html.
[151] CBC News, Brenda Martin returns to Canada, 1 May, 2008, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/brenda-martin-returns-to-canada-1.728326.
[152] Amnesty International’s Policy on Abortion, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/2846/2020/en/; Amnesty International’s Policy on State Obligations to Respect, Protect and Fulfil the Human Rights of Sex Workers, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol30/4062/2016/en/; Amnesty International, Human Rights and Drug Policy: A Paradigm Shift, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/POL3011302019ENGLISH.pdf.
[153] Alex Neve, Closing Canada’s International Human Rights Implementation Gap, Slaw: Canada’s Online Legal Magazine, 8 May, 2013, http://www.slaw.ca/2013/05/08/closing-canadas-international-human-rights-implementation-gap/.
[154] Promise and Reality: Canada’s international human rights implementation gap, Joint NGO Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council in relation to the February 2009 Universal Periodic Review of Canada, 8 September, 2008, http://socialrightscura.ca/documents/UPR/JS1_CAN_UPR_S4_2009_SocialRightsAdvocacyCentre_Etal_JOINT.pdf.
[155] Amnesty International, It is Time to Comply: Canada’s record of unimplemented UN human rights recommendations, 19 December, 2005. Copy on file with author.
[156] See “No justice no peace”, Section 3(c), Infra.
[157] Julia Kozma, Manfred Nowak and Martin Scheinin, A World Court of Human Rights: Consolidated Draft Statute and Commentary, May, 2010, https://www.eui.eu/Documents/DepartmentsCentres/Law/Professors/Scheinin/ConsolidatedWorldCourtStatute.pdf.
[158] What is R2P?, Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, https://www.globalr2p.org/what-is-r2p/.
[159] Code of conduct regarding Security Council action against genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, UN Doc. A/70/621–S/2015/978, 14 December, 2015, https://undocs.org/A/70/621; and Political Declaration on Suspension of Veto Powers in Cases of Mass Atrocities, 1 August, 2015, https://www.globalr2p.org/resources/list-of-supporters-of-the-political-declaration-on-suspension-of-veto/.
[160] Amnesty International, Sudan: Don’t we matter? Four years of unrelenting attacks against civilians in Sudan’s South Kordofan state, AFR 54/2162/2015, 18 August, 2015, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr54/2162/2015/en/.
[161] Interim report of the Special Rapporteur of the Human Rights Council on torture and other cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment, UN Doc. A/66/268, 5 August, 2011, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N11/445/70/PDF/N1144570.pdf?OpenElement.
[162] United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules), UN Doc. A/RES/70/175, 8 January, 2016, Rules 43-45, https://undocs.org/A/RES/70/175.
[163] UN Committee against Torture, Concluding observations on the seventh periodic report of Canada, 21 December, 2018, para. 15, https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/Download.aspx?symbolno=CAT/C/CAN/CO/7&Lang=En.
[164] Amnesty International welcomes Canada’s commitment to join torture prevention treaty, 3 May, 2016, https://www.amnesty.ca/news/amnesty-international-welcomes-canada%E2%80%99s-commitment-join-torture-prevention-treaty.
[165] Report of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review: Canada, UN Doc. A/HRC/39/11, 11 July, 2018, paras. 142.8-142.20, https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G18/210/82/PDF/G1821082.pdf?OpenElement.
[166] There are, for example, nine European Human Rights Ambassadors: Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Introducing the European Human Rights Ambassadors: A Joint Blog, 13 November, 2020, https://www.government.nl/latest/news/2020/11/13/introducing-the-european-human-rights-ambassadors.
[167] Government of the Netherlands, National Action Plan on Human Rights 2020, https://www.government.nl/documents/publications/2020/05/31/national-action-plan-on-human-rights-2020; Government of New Zealand, International Human Rights Action Plan 2019 – 2023, https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/peace-rights-and-security/human-rights/.
[168] Department of Canadian Heritage, About Human Rights, https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/about-human-rights.html.
[169] “… While taking its human rights’ obligations very seriously, as an equal and independent order of government reporting to its citizens, Alberta is not bound to report on international instruments/mechanisms to which it is not a Party.” Protocol for Follow-up to Recommendations from International Human Rights Bodies, November, 2020, https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/about-human-rights/protocol-follow-up-recommendations.html.
[170] From Promise to Reality: Amnesty International’s Recommendations for the 2017 Federal/Provincial/Territorial Human Rights Meeting, 7 December, 2017, https://www.amnesty.ca/sites/default/files/From%20Promise%20to%20Reality%20-%20EN%20FINAL.PDF.
[171] Alex Neve, Forum of Ministers on Human Rights: At long last, a chance to advance a national human rights agenda?, 3 December, 2020, https://www.alexneve.ca/blog/forum-of-ministers-on-human-rights-at-long-last-a-chance-to-advance-a-national-human-rights-agenda
[172] Human Rights Committee, Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, Committee against Torture, Committee on the Rights of the Child, and Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
[173] Declaration on the Right and Responsibility of Individuals, Groups and Organs of Society to Promote and Protect Universally Recognized Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, UN General Assembly Resolution 53/144, 9 December, 1998, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/RightAndResponsibility.aspx.
[174] Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SRHRDefenders/Pages/SRHRDefendersIndex.aspx.
[175] UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Final warning: death threats and killings of human rights defenders, UN Doc. A/HRC/46/35, 24 December, 2020, https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/46/35.
[176] UN Special Rapporteur on indigenous peoples, Attacks against and criminalization of indigenous peoples defending their rights, UN Doc. A/HRC/39/17, 10 August, 2018, https://undocs.org/A/HRC/39/17.
[177] Front Line Defenders, Global Analysis 2020, 9 February 2021, https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/sites/default/files/fld_global_analysis_2020.pdf; Amnesty International, Defenceless Defenders: Attacks on Afghanistan’s Human Rights Community, ASA 11/0844/2019, 28 August, 2019, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/08/afghanistan-human-rights-defenders-under-attack/.
[178] Nina Lakhani, Berta Cáceres was exceptional. Her murder was all too commonplace, The Guardian, 2 June, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/02/berta-caceres-was-exceptional-her-was-all-too-commonplace.
[179] Defend Defenders: East and Horn of Africa Human Rights Defenders Project, Targeted but not Deterred: Human Rights Defenders Fighting for Justice and Peace in South Sudan, 19 May, 2020, https://defenddefenders.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/South-Sudan-report.pdf;
[180] UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Situation of women human rights defenders, UN Doc. A/HRC/40/60, 10 January, 2019, https://undocs.org/A/HRC/40/60.
[181] Front Line Defenders, LGBTIQ+ and Sex Worker Rights Defenders at Risk During COVID-19, December 2020, https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/sites/default/files/front_line_defenders_covid-19.pdf.
[182] UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Situation of environmental human rights
Defenders, UN Doc. A/71/281, 3 August, 2016, https://undocs.org/A/71/281; Global Witness, Defending Tomorrow: The climate crisis and threats against land and environmental defenders, July 2020, https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/defending-tomorrow/
[183] Voices-Voix, www.facebook.com/voices.voix.coalition/.
[184] Matt Simmons, RCMP arrest journalists, matriarchs and land defenders following Gidimt’en eviction of Coastal GasLink, The Narwhal, 20 November, 2021, https://thenarwhal.ca/journalists-arrested-rcmp-wetsuweten/.
[185] Rochelle Baker, Elders for old growth arrested as Fairy Creek blockade readies for winter, 8 December, 2021, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2021/12/08/elders-for-old-growth-arrested-as-fairy-creek-blockade-readies-for-winter.html.
[186] Myanmar's internet shutdown: what's going on and will it crush dissent?, The Guardian, 17 February, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/17/myanmars-internet-shutdown-whats-going-on-and-it-crush-dissent.
[187] Emmanuel Akinwotu, Nigerian broadcasters ordered to stop using ‘unpatriotic’ Twitter, The Guardian, 7 June, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/07/nigerian-government-tv-radio-broadcasters-suspend-twitter.
[188] Currently, however, a Sudanese military coup has put those important democratic gains in jeopardy. Human Rights Watch, Sudan is Backsliding Dangerously, 18 November, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/11/18/sudan-backsliding-dangerously.
[189] Human Rights Defenders Declaration, Supra, footnote 173, article 1.
[190] Amnesty International, Colombia: El derecho a defender los derechos humanos, AMR 23/101/2002/s, 9 September, 2002, https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/112000/amr231012002es.pdf.
[191] Amnesty International, You are not alone, 9 May, 2018, https://www.amnesty.ca/blog/you-are-not-alone.
[192] https://cedehm.org.mx/es/.
[193] Amnesty International, Chad: Thousands displaced by attacks from Sudan, AFR 20/005/2006, 31 May, 2006, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr20/005/2006/en/.
[194] Amnesty International, Côte d’Ivoire: 'They looked at his identity card and shot him dead'; Six months of post-electoral violence, AFR 31/002/2011, 25 May, 2011, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr31/002/2011/en/.
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