Title: Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World

Date: Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Description: The world is facing a deepening climate crisis, the legacy of genocide and mass atrocities, and a rise in hate and division. There is an urgent need to renew the promise of universal human rights, both in our communities and globally.

Alex Neve’s 2025 CBC Massey Lectures examine that challenge, highlighting the importance of people power and solidarity. In this talk, Neve will outline the themes of the lectures, including the fractured state of the world, the importance of universality and a hopeful path forward.

Speakers:

• Alex Neve - Professor of international human rights, University of Ottawa; and 2025 CBC Massey Lecturer

Video:

Podcast:

Transcript: 

00:00:00
So I'm Sherry Aiken.
00:00:02
I'm a professor in the Faculty of Law, and it's my absolute pleasure to welcome you this evening.
00:00:08
I want to begin by just sharing a few words about this lectureship.
00:00:13
The Catriona Gibson Memorial Lectureship was established back in 1972 by Doctors W.M.
00:00:22
Gibson and J.B.
00:00:23
Gibson of Okotoks, Alberta, in memory of their daughter, Catriona Gibson, who was a Queen's Law alum and a young lawyer of great promise who was tragically killed in an automobile accident back in 1969.
00:00:38
The Gibson, as we refer to it here in the law faculty, provides for a lecture to be delivered annually by a distinguished scholar on a subject related to law and a current social problem.
00:00:51
So I think it's, frankly, I couldn't imagine a more fitting person to assume the mantle of this year's Gibson than Alex Neve.
00:00:59
So let me just share with you a few words of introduction to Alex for those of you who don't know him.
00:01:06
Alex is a human rights lawyer and an officer of the Order of Canada.
00:01:11
He served as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada for 20 years, and in that capacity took part in more than 40 human rights advocacy and research delegations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Guantanamo Bay, and closer to home in Indigenous communities.
00:01:30
Alex holds appointments as an adjunct professor in international human rights law at Ottawa's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.
00:01:39
He also holds an appointment at Dalhousie University, where he just was a few weeks ago delivering an intensive course on human rights advocacy.
00:01:49
Alex also serves right here at Queen's as co-editor-in-chief of the PKI Global Justice Journal.
00:01:56
As of December last year, Alex is also one of three expert members of the UN Fact-Finding Mission tasked with investigating human rights violations in Venezuela.
00:02:08
Couldn't be more timely.
00:02:11
Over the course of his career, Alex has been a guiding light, a beacon, and a champion of human rights here at home and around the world.
00:02:20
If you haven't read his book yet,
00:02:23
Universal, Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World.
00:02:26
It's available for sale right here by our representative from the novel IDEA, and I strongly recommend it.
00:02:35
I invite you to pick up a copy because not only does it introduce you to Alex's life, work, and contributions,
00:02:43
It explains in immediate, accessible terms why we all should care about human rights, why human rights matter, and why we need to get engaged in fighting for human rights in an incredibly compelling way through first-person accounts and the lived experiences of the human rights defenders that Alex has met over the course of the last 30 years.
00:03:11
It exemplifies for me what I think is Alex's secret sauce, that human rights has to start and end with people and a fierce commitment to be present and engaging with what's happening in our world while holding space for the human connections along the way.
00:03:31
And I just, before handing things over to Alex, want to share one quick anecdote with all of you.
00:03:36
I had the privilege of attending
00:03:39
Alex's first Massey lecture at Kerner Hall in Toronto.
00:03:44
It was packed to the rafters.
00:03:46
And after the lecture was over, Alex received a standing ovation.
00:03:50
And then we were invited to go to the two mics that were set up in the hall to ask questions.
00:03:56
And, you know, it's not an unintimidating thing to ask a question in a hall with that many people.
00:04:03
But up to the mic strode a six-year-old boy.
00:04:07
And he asked Alex, he was the second person to ask a question.
00:04:10
He asked Alex, why did you get involved in human rights?
00:04:15
And what was so interesting is that even though I've known Alex for some 30 years now, I heard a story I hadn't heard before in response to the six-year-old's question.
00:04:24
And it was actually a story how when Alex was a young boy himself, he watched as his mother
00:04:31
campaigned for daycare in Alberta and how, you know, back then in the 1970s, there really wasn't daycare for working moms.
00:04:41
And I remember that myself, actually, as the only child of a working mom.
00:04:45
In any way, he watched his mother, you know, with her plastic bag full of buttons saying daycare now, go off after dinner to organize and to campaign and basically learn from his mother's example that when there are problems, we have to fix them.
00:05:01
So with that, it is my great pleasure to turn things over to Alex, who's going to talk to us about human rights and renewing them in our fractured world.
00:05:11
Over to you.
00:05:20
Thank you for such a warm and thoughtful introduction.
00:05:24
It's always a little bit kind of embarrassing to sit there and listen to yourself be introduced.
00:05:29
But it's so beautiful and meaningful when it's a very treasured friend and colleague sharing those words.
00:05:34
And that's exactly who Sherry has always been to me.
00:05:39
So it adds extra meaning to the evening to have begun this way.
00:05:44
Thank you, Sherry.
00:05:46
And I'm delighted to be here.
00:05:48
And this experience of delivering the Massey lectures last fall, and now the many, many
00:05:58
follow up and spin off, I've been calling them the massy adjacent events, keep on giving.
00:06:05
And that is just such a source of, and it may seem like an odd word to use in these difficult, despairing, heavy times, but it's been so exhilarating because what it is gathering, as we are tonight with
00:06:22
You know, fellow travelers, like-minded souls who, and all of us are feeling this, are worried, lost, angry, upset, despairing, cynical, you name it.
00:06:34
You probably feel a different one of those emotions on any given day of the week.
00:06:39
But we have these opportunities to come together to have a conversation that matters so very much in these times.
00:06:47
So it's wonderful to see you here.
00:06:48
And I know we have colleagues and friends who are joining online as well.
00:06:53
So my remarks this evening, I think we're into evening, do definitely involve the theme of the Massey lectures.
00:07:04
And I'm in fact going to begin with the first word, which is universal.
00:07:12
And I was going to say we're in a law school.
00:07:15
I guess we're beside a law school.
00:07:16
So I'm going to speak a little Latin because the word universal is from the Latin, universus.
00:07:25
And it simply means altogether, whole, entire.
00:07:29
And it is a word that is truly all-encompassing for everyone and everywhere.
00:07:36
And at times, it is a word that shouts with incredible passion and confidence.
00:07:42
And when universal is on full display, it truly is magnificent.
00:07:49
In other moments, it speaks tentatively, doesn't it?
00:07:53
With anxious hesitation, because its full extent so often eludes us.
00:08:00
And when we are honest, which we aren't necessarily
00:08:05
Honest as much as we should in this world, we acknowledge that universality is, in fact, far too often deliberately betrayed.
00:08:15
We live in a time of what feels to be unprecedented global turmoil, hate and division.
00:08:22
Truth is under siege and disinformation is on the rise.
00:08:26
Legal and democratic norms and institutions are under attack.
00:08:30
On a rapidly warming planet, we face the gravest ever threat to our well-being and even survival.
00:08:38
The inherent sacredness of life is aggressively contested from countless directions.
00:08:45
This is not universality's finest hour.
00:08:50
But it can be.
00:08:52
In the raw aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, as governments elaborated,
00:08:59
the world's first global human rights promises, this is the word they chose.
00:09:06
In 1948, they proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:09:12
Universal was a very unconventional title for an international legal instrument.
00:09:18
The drafters of the Declaration and the states that voted for it were saying, this is for all of us.
00:09:27
And in 2026, the word still packs a powerful punch.
00:09:32
But it also screams to us of our profound failure to keep the promise.
00:09:38
For we are far from a world in which the human rights of all are equally acknowledged, let alone respected.
00:09:47
What we confidently placed at the heart of the promise, at its very core,
00:09:54
Its universality is above all else where we have fallen short.
00:10:00
But even as this maelstrom of violence and hate and lies raise the fabric of universal human rights, billions of people continue to hold the promise close.
00:10:14
They resist and organize precisely because the promise is universal.
00:10:19
They do so even though the promise has been withheld from them.
00:10:24
Here, universality is linked to courage and imagination.
00:10:29
It is fueled by conviction and hard work.
00:10:32
It is nourished by solidarity, and it speaks truth that ultimately cannot be denied.
00:10:39
This universality rises above lies and manufactured hate.
00:10:45
This universality yearns to unite us in something hopeful and good.
00:10:53
In early 2019, while interviewing Rohingya refugees who had fled genocidal attacks in Myanmar and were now living in overcrowded and dangerous refugee camps in Bangladesh, I spent time with Mohamed Salim, and he spoke to me of drowning.
00:11:12
We drowned in waves of violence and hate spread by Facebook in Myanmar, he said.
00:11:18
We nearly drowned as we made our way across the Naf River.
00:11:22
Our boat had holes in it and the water was pouring in.
00:11:26
We have nearly drowned many times here in the camp when the monsoons brought rain and mud.
00:11:33
Our desperate friends and family drown when they go out into the Bay of Bengal.
00:11:38
hoping to make it somewhere safe, but their unsafe ships sink or are lost.
00:11:44
Now they want to drown us by sending us to live in a prison camp for refugees on a flooded sandbar island far out in the ocean.
00:11:53
And we drown every day in the camp because we are locked up like criminals, don't have enough food, and our children are not even allowed to go to school.
00:12:04
We Rohingya,
00:12:05
are forgotten and left to drown.
00:12:09
But when I learned about the Universal Declaration, he said, I knew that it holds promise as a lifeboat.
00:12:19
I can assure you that the last thing I expected to see as I stooped to enter Mohammed's tiny immaculate shelter in Jamtoli Refugee Camp was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but there it was.
00:12:35
faded and curled at the edges, pinned to the central post supporting the blue plastic sheeting that was home to Mohammed, his wife, their four young children, and his wife's elderly parents.
00:12:49
Drowning is an apt metaphor for all that the Rohingya have been through, drowning literally while crossing rivers or taking to the high seas to reach safety, or when faced with the wrath of monsoon rains and flooding.
00:13:03
drowning figuratively under waves of violence in hate, in person and online, and a punitive existence in the refugee camps, drowning with no end insight.
00:13:15
As they fled the genocidal violence in Myanmar in 2017, Mohammed had watched as his beloved uncle was shot and killed in front of him.
00:13:26
At the time, the world was moved.
00:13:30
by the ferocious attacks and indescribable suffering inflicted upon the Rohingya.
00:13:37
But with a global shrug of indifference, their plight seems forgotten now.
00:13:42
Mohammed's family was simply eight among one million refugees crammed into camps with no prospect of returning home.
00:13:52
What was so compelling about my conversation with Mohammed, however, is that it ended
00:13:59
not with hopelessness, but with hope.
00:14:03
For he saw hope promised in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a lifeboat for humanity.
00:14:12
Yet the world has yet to ensure that the lifeboat will be seaworthy.
00:14:18
Muhammad's experience speaks to so many of our world's ongoing ruptures, mass atrocities and repression.
00:14:28
the climate crisis, hate and polarization, economic deprivation, the reach of social media, and the immense scale of forced displacement.
00:14:38
These crises are not only urgent, they are existential.
00:14:42
They go deep into the heart of how we live our lives, how we view each other, and how we relate to the natural world on which our very existence depends.
00:14:53
All the more daunting,
00:14:55
given that the rules-based legal frameworks we have counted on to bring some degree of order to our world are collapsing.
00:15:04
The United Nations is more deadlocked than ever under the Security Council's dysfunctional watch enabled by the disgraceful veto power wielded by three of the five permanent members, the United States, Russia, and China, without the slightest concern for law, morality,
00:15:23
or just plain human decency?
00:15:26
Under their watch, genocide has marched on in Gaza, where the humanity of Palestinians is denied and their plight is now left in the hands of Donald Trump's Board of Peace.
00:15:40
The blatantly unlawful invasion of Ukraine is never taken up, not one single resolution.
00:15:48
The unilateral and illegal U.S.
00:15:50
armed incursion into Venezuela
00:15:53
Nothing.
00:15:54
The massacre of thousands of protesters on the streets of Iran.
00:15:59
Again, nothing.
00:16:02
And while wrenching crises in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Myanmar extend and deepen, so too do the excuses for and thus normalization of inaction.
00:16:17
Disavowal of international law abounds.
00:16:20
Authoritarian leaders are winning elections.
00:16:23
And there is frequent dinner table and street corner talk of rising fascism, including in our own midst, including at the White House.
00:16:33
I'm sure you've all been part of those conversations.
00:16:37
Awash in a sea of disinformation and the rapid demise of truth, we are left with an increasingly wobbly tiller in our lifeboat, held together with rubber bands and duct tape with which to navigate these turbulent waters.
00:16:55
But we do nevertheless have that lifeboat, and no matter how leaky or wobbly,
00:17:03
Mohammed, Salim, and millions upon millions of people everywhere are intent on steering it to safe harbor.
00:17:12
So must we.
00:17:16
And yes, our world is indeed fractured in many, many ways, fractures that have ruptured the human rights of hundreds of millions of people through the global climate emergency, genocide and atrocities, repression, hate, and authoritarianism.
00:17:31
forced displacement and economic inequality, and the unrelenting march of technology into every corner of our lives.
00:17:40
Fractures, though, that can be healed by a true embrace of the universal promise.
00:17:48
Looking back, looking way back, we are reminded of the essential beliefs and truths that lie behind the universal human rights promise.
00:18:00
Going back millennia, in fact, long before the promise was enshrined in the Universal Declaration in 1948.
00:18:08
We see it, we hear it, we feel it, we live it in indigenous teachings, religious and spiritual parables, the reflections of philosophers, and the rallying cries of all the momentous times of revolution and rebellion.
00:18:24
Life is sacred.
00:18:26
We are joined together in our common humanity.
00:18:30
And we all yearn for and deserve fairness and freedom.
00:18:36
Powerfully captured in so many ways, including by the African concept of Ubuntu.
00:18:43
I am because we are.
00:18:47
Yet humanity's journey has also been marked by our unforgivable failure to acknowledge that universal human rights are inherent and they are inalienable.
00:18:58
meaning we are all born with them.
00:19:01
We do not have to do a thing to earn them, and they can never be stripped away for any reason.
00:19:09
But instead, human rights have become rather an exclusive club, haven't they?
00:19:14
Steeped in white, moneyed,
00:19:17
patriarchal privilege, exclusion is rooted in sexism and misogyny, racism and intolerance, political domination, and economic exploitation.
00:19:29
And though some degree of auxiliary membership has perhaps opened up over the years, minimally and selectively, the clubhouse remains largely surrounded by fences of geopolitics, money, national security, intolerance,
00:19:47
and indifference, which at times seem unbreachable.
00:19:52
Even with those high fences, however, the galvanizing power of people, be it one person acting courageously and defiantly, or millions upon millions of people mobilizing and resisting to make change happen in our world, perseveres, and it does prevail.
00:20:15
This is such a time for that collective, ultimately invincible power to rise.
00:20:24
And we must remember, change always begins with one person who demands that it be so.
00:20:33
As was the case one day in October 2002, when a woman who introduced herself as Monya Mazig, called the Amnesty International Office,
00:20:44
and was put through to me.
00:20:45
And it was actually one of those rare days that I answered my phone.
00:20:50
Her husband, Meher Arar, a Canadian citizen, had been arrested while changing planes in New York City on his way home to Ottawa from a family trip to Tunisia.
00:21:01
Mounia was concerned that he might be sent to Syria, where he had been born.
00:21:06
And after two weeks of unlawful detention in Brooklyn, Maher was indeed subject to extraordinary rendition to Syria by way of a CIA ghost claim.
00:21:18
There, he endured a year of unlawful detention, torture, and other egregious human rights violations.
00:21:27
Meanwhile, Mornin mounted a truly heroic campaign to win Maher's freedom.
00:21:35
It was a remarkable demonstration of courage at a time when simply wearing a hijab was a source of suspicion and recrimination.
00:21:44
Many people shied away at first, not wanting to associate themselves with anything related to the United States and terrorism allegations.
00:21:54
But her persistence gained momentum, and Mayher's plight eventually became one of the top political issues in the country.
00:22:02
And finally, on October the 5th, 2003, he was released and he returned home.
00:22:09
But it didn't end there.
00:22:11
Meher and Monya called for a public inquiry, stressing that accountability was crucial in order to ensure this would not happen again to anyone else.
00:22:23
And even though there was considerable public sympathy, and there was,
00:22:27
It was a tall order to convince any government to subject its national security practices to that level of scrutiny in those years still raw and turbulent after 9-11.
00:22:41
But to his credit, Prime Minister Paul Martin did just that, and he convened a judicial inquiry.
00:22:50
Then after two years of hearings, the presiding judge
00:22:54
Justice Dennis O'Connor released two voluminous reports.
00:22:58
He exonerated Mayher, leading to an official apology and compensation from the government.
00:23:04
Justice O'Connor also made recommendations for badly needed strengthening of oversight of Canada's national security and law enforcement agencies.
00:23:14
That, in turn, eventually led to creation of the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians,
00:23:22
and the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency.
00:23:26
And last year, legislation was passed to establish the Public Complaints and Review Commission, which will oversee the Canada Border Services Agency and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police once it is set up.
00:23:41
So why did I recount all of that history?
00:23:45
It reminds us, of course, of the cost of selling human rights short to national security.
00:23:52
but it also tells us the following.
00:23:55
All of this enormous consequential change, legal, institutional change that will have impact and consequences for years and decades, all for one simple reason.
00:24:10
Monia Mazigh was determined to win her husband's freedom.
00:24:14
Change begins with one person.
00:24:20
Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has recently said that our world faces a stark choice between two paths.
00:24:30
One of enlightened cooperation and solidarity, stable and seeking balance with our natural world.
00:24:39
The other, unmistakably dystopian.
00:24:45
Clearly, we seek that first path.
00:24:49
But there's always been an excuse to wander off that path, hasn't there been?
00:24:54
Instead, markets, wars, geopolitics, and securitization rule.
00:25:00
Us idealists are told we have to be realistic and understand that's how problems are really solved in our world.
00:25:08
Yet I don't know about you, but it's pretty clear to me that approach has failed colossally.
00:25:16
And we are now looking down not just the beginning, but we've started down the dystopian path.
00:25:23
So what of that other path?
00:25:27
The enlightened one.
00:25:29
As my dear friend and colleague, Pam Pomater, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University, a citizen of the Mi'kma'ki Nation and a member of Eel River Bar First Nation,
00:25:43
told my international human rights class at the University of Ottawa last year, Imagine all the good we could do and the better country and world we would live in for indigenous peoples and all of humanity if we actually simply gave human rights their turn, just as we have always said we would.
00:26:06
Indeed, it is time to fully and completely give human rights their turn.
00:26:13
To do so, first and foremost, we have to get our own house in order.
00:26:18
And above all, that means acknowledging our history of genocide, of indigenous peoples in Canada, and committing to genuine reconciliation.
00:26:29
It means ending blatant double standards in our human rights diplomacy, such as our divergent and imbalanced and racist approach over the decades to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
00:26:42
and our recent total silence, no matter how low Donald Trump goes with his dismantling of the global human rights regime.
00:26:51
It means putting universal human rights at the heart of our climate policy.
00:26:56
Pipelines, anyone?
00:26:59
And certainly, trade deals, such as, for instance, when chasing a new economic strategic partnership with China, which doesn't even whisper a word.
00:27:11
About human rights, it absolutely must mean demonstrating to Canadians and to the world that we are prepared to take our international.
00:27:20
human rights obligations seriously.
00:27:22
In other words, that we expect of ourselves nothing more than what we expect of the rest of the world.
00:27:32
I didn't mean to say nothing more.
00:27:33
I meant to say nothing less, of course.
00:27:36
In fact, we must thoroughly reimagine the place of universal human rights in our world.
00:27:42
This is that moment.
00:27:43
This is a moment to elevate human rights and challenge ourselves
00:27:48
to live our lives differently, a time for renewal, building on what we have created while reconceiving something different, all with a heightened sense of purpose.
00:28:00
The universal human rights renewal that I want to share with you, the one that I imagine, has six key elements to it.
00:28:08
Put human rights first, embrace universality and commit to equality,
00:28:14
protect human rights defenders and the right to protest, ensure justice, be expansive, and perhaps most profoundly of all, believe in and champion human rights.
00:28:32
And it starts, number one, of course, with putting human rights first.
00:28:37
But there's always an excuse, isn't there?
00:28:39
There's always been an excuse for putting human rights on hold, putting human rights on the backseat, leaving human rights till another day, one day, not now.
00:28:47
There are other priorities.
00:28:48
Human rights, oh, they'll be a distraction.
00:28:50
Oh, human rights, they're so expensive.
00:28:53
Human rights, you know, honestly, we just don't care.
00:28:57
That anguish is captured so powerfully in Omar El-Aqad's
00:29:02
recent book, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
00:29:09
In Acree de Coeur, a devastating critique of the world's failure to act to end genocide in Gaza, he writes, When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act.
00:29:26
The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing.
00:29:37
It is very important to do the right thing eventually.
00:29:44
Well, universal human rights were never intended to be left for that eventual one day.
00:29:50
They were to be the starting point.
00:29:52
That is why the Universal Declaration explicitly talks of human rights being the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.
00:30:03
A solid foundation, not a leaky roof.
00:30:09
Delaying human rights
00:30:11
robs them entirely of their purpose.
00:30:14
Human rights do not rise to the top after a people have been decimated by genocide are not something to think about after we have ravaged our communities by the climate crisis.
00:30:26
They do not come to the fore after economic policy and trade deals has gutted a village, a community, a nation of its livelihood.
00:30:37
So how about an international human rights action plan?
00:30:42
We have actually never had one in this country, backed by an ambassador for human rights to bring consistency and heft to our human rights diplomacy.
00:30:53
Similarly, we need a nationwide framework for international human rights implementation on the home front, as we are far from where we should be in living up to those obligations, championed
00:31:06
by ministers who actually have explicit human rights mandates.
00:31:09
We don't have any of those in the country either.
00:31:13
And that would be all with an eye to ramping up domestic compliance with Canada's international human rights obligations.
00:31:20
Putting human rights first surely also requires A concerted effort to ratify all outstanding human rights treaties yet to be taken up by Canada, of which there are, you may be surprised to hear,
00:31:34
Far too many, which we have simply pushed off the table.
00:31:40
Number two, embrace universality and commit to equality.
00:31:46
When human rights are upheld for some people, but not everyone, in some places, not everywhere, and sometimes, not always,
00:31:58
And when some rights are given meaning and purpose and others are completely ignored, universality is nowhere to be found.
00:32:10
At a time when equality rights are under withering attack from many governments, including, of course, our very close southern neighbor,
00:32:20
Canada needs to offer substantial diplomatic, political, and financial support for, and I'm going to say those three words, diversity, equity, and inclusion around the world as a hallmark of Canadian foreign policy.
00:32:38
This is absolutely not the time to tiptoe around what has absurdly become a vilified acronym, DEI,
00:32:47
And it is certainly not the time to retreat from DEI programming in a meaningful way.
00:32:54
Advancing equality on the world stage must also be backed up by addressing inequality at home.
00:33:00
Top of that list has to mean full respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples.
00:33:06
How about all jurisdictions incorporating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into their laws?
00:33:13
So far, it's only been federal, BC, and the Northwest Territories.
00:33:18
And we must all embrace our shared personal responsibility to live up to that declaration.
00:33:25
How many of us have truly made our own reconciliation commitment?
00:33:31
We should.
00:33:33
And so much more.
00:33:34
I guess it is too late for last fall's budget, but federal funding for rights and equality needs to grow substantially.
00:33:43
Just imagine,
00:33:44
if you will, for a moment.
00:33:45
We use that word a lot in human rights circles, don't we?
00:33:48
Imagine if we devoted even a fraction of the 5% of our GDP that is being steered towards the military, towards rights and equality initiatives.
00:34:05
A particular shout out for refugees who are, despite the attitude of many governments, fully entitled
00:34:13
to the universal human rights promise.
00:34:16
Bringing it close to home, then should we not suspend, I would say rip up, the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement so that refugees who are demonstrably not safe in the United States, why do we even have to have that conversation, in fact, are more at risk with each Sharpie signed into power executive order, each ICE deployment,
00:34:43
are actually able to access refugee protection here in Canada.
00:34:47
That we have not is frankly an unfathomable disgrace, and it eviscerates the heart of any notion that we're committed to universality.
00:34:59
Next, #3, protect human rights defenders and the right to protest.
00:35:05
To our collective shame, human rights defenders often pay with their lives.
00:35:11
for simply trying to make the universal human rights promise real.
00:35:17
And now that persecution has expanded to the point that it's become transnational, crossing borders with numerous governments, China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and many others, targeting activists and journalists in other countries, including here in Canada.
00:35:35
And when demonstrators take to the street
00:35:39
To defend human rights, governments of all stripes, be they repressive or democratic, seek to break protest movements, often with brutal force.
00:35:50
My heart breaks today as we think about the legions of protesters in the streets of Iran who have paid with their lives.
00:36:00
We need to recognize the essential role of human rights defenders and peaceful protest in society.
00:36:07
as sentinels of human rights protection and the very lifeblood of democracy.
00:36:13
And thus, defenders and protesters around the world must be able to count on the Canadian government to have their back, always.
00:36:21
We also need our own national action plan to protect human rights defenders in Canada, including Indigenous land defenders who are far too often criminalized for simply standing up
00:36:34
for rights, equality, the environment, and land and territory.
00:36:40
Nationwide guidelines for upholding the right to protest across the country consistently in all corners of the country would not go amiss, be that in rallies in front of Parliament, homelessness encampments in public parks, solidarity encampments on university campuses,
00:36:58
or demonstrations that block traffic in our streets.
00:37:01
No one should ever be threatened, killed, or silenced for defending human rights or speaking out when they are violated.
00:37:10
That must be universal.
00:37:14
Number 4, ensure justice.
00:37:18
It's as simple as this.
00:37:19
Enforcement of the universal promise is nigh impossible if there is no effective remedy to turn to when rights are violated.
00:37:29
There's so much to say here, but just consider this one example.
00:37:32
At the United Nations, Canada accepts individuals bringing forward complaints of civil and political rights violations, but not
00:37:44
of economic, social, and cultural rights.
00:37:46
That means that I can pursue justice if I feel the Canadian government has violated my rights to free expression or a fair trial.
00:37:55
That matters.
00:37:57
But I can't do that if I have been denied my rights to be able to access adequate housing or safe water.
00:38:06
That just puts it into sharp contrast, and that guts
00:38:10
the very heart out of any sense of universality when it comes to justice.
00:38:14
There has been some progress, uneven and tentative, in the drive to ensure that individuals who are responsible for mass atrocity crimes face justice, witness the growing caseload of the International Criminal Court, not without challenges.
00:38:30
But Canada has not kept pace with other countries in ensuring that our own national courts play their role in delivering international justice.
00:38:40
We need to increase our support for the International Criminal Court, the establishment of which, after all, Canada championed back in the day.
00:38:49
And we absolutely have to push back and certainly not remain silent, as has been our recent tendency, when the court's personnel, including a Canadian judge, are subject to political attacks and sanctions for doing their job originating from south of the border.
00:39:09
that should be reinforced by increasing financial and political support for universal jurisdiction prosecutions in Canadian courts for individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
00:39:24
And there's much more we can do to ensure human rights justice flourishes here at home.
00:39:29
Ratifying the optional protocols to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child
00:39:38
so that individual complaints of rights violations under those treaties can be made to UN bodies.
00:39:47
Curtailing, or restricting at least, resort to the notwithstanding clause in the Charter, increasingly used to deny human rights remedies, not for the rich and powerful, but consistently for some of the most marginalized and vulnerable communities in the country.
00:40:05
That would certainly go some way in opening up human rights justice, as would passing mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation and granting full investigative powers, denied now for almost 10 years to the Canadian ombudsperson for responsible enterprise.
00:40:24
It's as simple as this.
00:40:25
Any promise rises or falls on whether it is kept.
00:40:31
And we know in our world, wishful thinking,
00:40:34
that promises will be kept is not enough.
00:40:38
And when the universal human rights promise is broken, we have to be sure that justice is ready to step in.
00:40:48
Next up, let's open things up.
00:40:52
Number five, be expansive.
00:40:54
And some of you may be thinking, where is he going with this at a time when we face so many challenges in keeping what we've got.
00:41:03
He's calling for expansion.
00:41:05
Well, it's as simple as this, I think.
00:41:08
Renewing human rights compels us to ensure that the promise responds to needs that, yes, were not imagined when the Universal Declaration was written in 1948, but are real and present in our world today.
00:41:23
For human rights, to say that human rights are universal doesn't mean that they're static.
00:41:30
They are multifaceted and dynamic, and they must evolve as we evolve.
00:41:37
By any measure, the overriding threat to human rights in our world is the spiraling global human, the global climate catastrophe, something that was not envisioned in the slightest in 1948.
00:41:50
To ensure that the planet does not die, people around the world are recognizing nature's own rights,
00:42:00
The Magpie River in northern Quebec has now been granted legal personhood, meaning it is not simply an object to exploit, but a person to be protected.
00:42:11
And that's happening around the world.
00:42:13
In 2010, in fact, a people's conference with delegates from every corner of the planet adopted a universal declaration of the rights of Mother Earth.
00:42:27
Being expansive certainly must also extend to the distribution of wealth in our world.
00:42:32
We need an economy that makes deliberate linkages to human rights in such areas as taxation, debt, public services, climate finance, international development assistance, and reparations for colonialism and for slavery.
00:42:51
And what of technology?
00:42:54
The dizzying digital advantages of the past decade bring enormous human rights advantages.
00:43:00
There's no question about that.
00:43:03
But they also cause staggering human rights harms as they become irreversibly embedded now in our lives.
00:43:10
The challenge, a considerable one, and I don't pretend to have the answer, is to find the sweet spot that embraces the good and banishes the bad.
00:43:22
The one thing I do know is that leaving that in the hands of social media and technology billionaires has predictably been a colossal failure.
00:43:33
So yes, it is tempting to retreat to safeguarding existing rights frameworks that are under attack, but we must be expansive and ensure that human rights are relevant to the challenges of today.
00:43:48
And finally, I come to the last point.
00:43:51
And in some respects, I think it's maybe even the most important of all.
00:43:55
And it is this simple that we have to believe in and champion human rights.
00:44:03
Eleanor Roosevelt was a formidable and passionate believer in and champion of universal human rights in the crucial early years of the United Nations.
00:44:14
including chairing the first UN Commission on Human Rights and chairing the drafting committee that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
00:44:24
At an event in 1958, marking the 10th anniversary of the Declaration, she'd been asked to reflect on the meaning of universal human rights.
00:44:35
And this is just one small quote from what was a very stirring speech.
00:44:40
She asked the question,
00:44:42
Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?
00:44:47
And she said, in small places, close to home, so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world.
00:44:59
Indeed, universal is not just about the wide sweep of the world stage.
00:45:04
It is those small places close to home.
00:45:09
At its heart, it's about one person, one name, one person and one name at a time.
00:45:16
I learned that from the people of Jorlo.
00:45:20
In 2006, as genocidal violence in Sudan's Darfur region spilled into neighboring Chad, I spent several weeks with an Amnesty International research team traveling along the Chadian side of that troubled border.
00:45:36
documenting brutal attacks against isolated villages that had left a macabre trail of death and fear.
00:45:45
And one afternoon, we came upon the smoldering ruins of the village of Jorlo.
00:45:50
There was no one there.
00:45:52
The silence was eerie, broken only by our hushed voices, camera clicks as we took photos, pen scratches in our notebooks, and soft footsteps as we moved along the village's dry, craggy paths.
00:46:06
Life had disappeared from Jorlo.
00:46:10
No home was left intact.
00:46:12
There were bullet casings everywhere.
00:46:14
The remnants of ordinary life left behind were haunting.
00:46:19
Two small shoes, seemingly a matching pair for a very young child, hundreds of meters apart on opposite ends of the village.
00:46:28
Twisted and blackened bed frames.
00:46:31
Metal bowls, tin buckets, clay pots, baskets, cups, and plates strewn everywhere, some dented and covered in soot, others in shards.
00:46:41
Crops and food stores had been torched, and what appeared to have been precious water cisterns were smashed to pieces.
00:46:49
These ruins were signs of an attack by Darfur's murderous Janjaweed militia.
00:46:56
There was no one left to tell us what had happened, how many had died and how many still lived.
00:47:02
Where had they gone?
00:47:05
Two days later, we came upon the people of Jorlo around 50 kilometers away.
00:47:10
In an open field, they had taken shelter in a small grove of stunted trees.
00:47:16
Sheets of fabric were draped in the branches to shield against the remorseless sun.
00:47:22
We gathered under the only tree broad enough to offer some shade, and we heard the harrowing account of the attack, which had happened only 10 days earlier.
00:47:34
The details were horrific.
00:47:36
40 people had been killed.
00:47:39
And I then sat with a group of elders as they provided me with their names and ages.
00:47:45
And we very quickly reached 39 names, and then we stopped.
00:47:51
There was a great deal of discussion.
00:47:53
People reviewed the names in my notes, and I was asked to read them aloud several times.
00:47:59
Time passed, maybe an hour, and I was notified that the final name had been remembered.
00:48:05
But it wasn't just shouted out.
00:48:07
I was invited to return and reassemble with the elders back under the tree.
00:48:13
And only once we were all seated did someone speak the name, reverentially.
00:48:22
Haroon Yaqub.
00:48:26
And there was so much in that solemn moment.
00:48:29
It was not the fact that Haroon was the missing name on the list.
00:48:33
It was not the fact that Haroon had been killed that was the point, but rather that he had lived and would long be cherished for that life.
00:48:43
And that his name was being spoken to me, and now by me to you, and through us to the world,
00:48:50
because they believed that would serve his memory.
00:48:56
I wrote Harun Yaqub's name on a piece of paper that I slip into the back of my new annual agenda every January 1st, which is then carried with me everywhere for another year.
00:49:09
And over 20 years now, it has become a simple reminder of an essential truth.
00:49:16
Small places close to home.
00:49:19
believing that every life is sacred and matters deeply is the very core of universal human rights.
00:49:28
I have thought of that so often over those years.
00:49:33
I've thought of that so often recently as the genocidal death toll has mounted daily in Gaza, now over 71,000.
00:49:42
I thought of that in November as the world paid next to no attention to news that massacres
00:49:49
that had taken place in the Sudanese city of Al-Fasha were so terrible that bloodstains could be seen in satellite images from space.
00:49:59
I've thought of that these last few weeks as I try to imagine the thousands of protesters killed across Iran.
00:50:08
But I always come back to telling myself one name, one life at a time, far beyond
00:50:16
What those numbers convey, believe in that.
00:50:22
In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, Elie Wiesel was clear.
00:50:30
We must always take sides.
00:50:33
Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
00:50:36
Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
00:50:42
Martin Luther King Jr.
00:50:43
reminds us, and I think everyone knows these words,
00:50:46
that in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
00:50:51
That matters so much right now.
00:50:55
Indeed, we must forge that world in which there is no silence because we believe.
00:51:02
and beyond believing we stand together in solidarity with those whose rights are on the line.
00:51:08
And in doing so, we make it clear to everyone that we are not indifferent to genocide, to a burning planet, to sexism, racism and discrimination, to erasing trans lives, to shutting borders, to refugees, to homelessness.
00:51:22
We are certainly not indifferent to our responsibility to advance rights regarding reconciliation with indigenous peoples.
00:51:29
And we are not indifferent to breaking the promise of universal human rights.
00:51:37
And in all of that, let's remember hate does not overcome hate and denying someone's rights in response to their denial of my rights takes us precisely nowhere.
00:51:48
We have to look for where common ground offers space to open dialogue and build understanding.
00:51:56
I've often thought, wouldn't it be magnificent if we were able to regularly convene what I'll call people's human rights assemblies, bringing together Indigenous peoples, civil society, human rights commissions, governments, businesses, and the public to share perspectives, build awareness, foster greater commitment, learn from each other.
00:52:16
and commit to talking the talk and walking the walk of universal human rights.
00:52:23
Because the point is this, when we do believe, when we are empowered and bound to one another in solidarity, when we spread the word and protest, when we overcome doubt by making human rights real, when we defend human rights, when we set out to make change happen even against enormous odds, we can, and we do prevail.
00:52:46
The day before I delivered the fourth Massey lecture in October in Happy Valley, Goose Bay, Labrador, I had the great gift of meeting Cheyenne Michelle, a young Inuit woman from Shahaji First Nation.
00:53:04
And she spoke to me movingly at length about what human rights mean to her.
00:53:09
Her words go to the very heart of the universal promise.
00:53:14
And there were three words in particular that really stayed with me.
00:53:18
For as she said, Isn't it, at the end of the day, all about the right to belong?
00:53:26
Indeed, it is.
00:53:26
And it means we must all join in.
00:53:29
We must all make it clear that everyone, every single one of us does belong.
00:53:34
We will not allow anyone to be set aside.
00:53:40
And for all its unvarnished clarity and much-needed honesty, we did not hear much, concretely and convincingly, from Prime Minister Carney about committing ourselves to that world, that world of universal human rights, that world of universal belonging in his recent speech at the World Economic Forum.
00:54:07
Our collective determination has advanced the universal promise of human rights in the past so many times.
00:54:14
And it can and it must do so again.
00:54:17
Because at the end of the day, the promise is ours.
00:54:22
The promise belongs to us.
00:54:26
The Charter of the United Nations does, after all, begin with three very simple words.
00:54:33
We, the peoples.
00:54:36
Thank you.