Indigenous and non-Indigenous international law experts and academics from across Canada recently gathered at Queen’s Law to discuss the crimes against humanity perpetrated on Indigenous Peoples and how justice and accountability might be achieved for the resulting widespread and systematic harms.

Funded by the Law Commission of Canada, the symposium, titled “Widespread and Systematic — A Symposium on Crimes Against Humanity and Indigenous Peoples,” was organized by Queen’s Law Professor Kimberly Murray, National Scholar in Indigenous Legal Studies and former Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burials Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, and Professor Mark Kersten, Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of the Fraser Valley.

The two-day symposium was planned as a forum to discuss the work ahead to build on the 2024 release of Murray’s final report as the Independent Special Interlocutor, Upholding Sacred Obligations: Reparations for Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada, in which Kersten was a contributing writer. Included in the report is a finding that many Indigenous children taken to Indian Residential Schools were victims of enforced disappearances as a result of the widespread and systematic actions and inactions of the Canadian State. There has been little to no justice and accountability for these crimes against humanity, and the question of how justice can be achieved has not been fully answered.

“The symposium provided an opportunity for productive convergence and collaboration to examine how three intersecting legal orders — Indigenous, international, and domestic — can be braided together to achieve justice and accountability for Indigenous Peoples and communities,” Murray says.

“What became clear throughout the discussions was that international and domestic laws have failed Indigenous Peoples. For proper reparations to occur, Indigenous laws and legal orders must be embraced and adopted as required by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”

The crimes against humanity discussed at the symposium included murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, persecution, enforced disappearances, apartheid, and other inhumane acts. With the guidance of two Elders, participants explored whether and how these specific acts constitutive of crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and international human rights violations were committed.

“It is accepted and understood that many of these harms cannot be addressed by international courts due to limitations on their temporal jurisdiction,” Kersten says. “However, in accordance with broader efforts to decolonize international law and systems, it is important to apply the logic and language of international criminal law to the harms committed against Indigenous Peoples. Doing so can generate new insights into the nature of the atrocities committed and reveal novel approaches to justice, accountability, and reparations. Even if international courts aren’t available, it is not too late to pursue or deliver justice.”

The symposium will culminate in a book that Murray and Kersten will co-edit, with symposium participants contributing chapters that will focus on the numerous crimes against humanity that have been committed against Indigenous Peoples within Canada.

“The symposium was an important first step to creating what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called for, ‘historically literate citizens’ by writing and publishing a book that identifies all the crimes against humanity that have been, and in some cases continue to be, perpetrated on Indigenous Peoples and communities,” Murray says.

By Tracy Weaver