International Human Rights Research

This book shows how human rights became the primary language for social change in Canada and how a single decade became the locus for that emergence. The author argues that the 1970s was a critical moment in human rights history--one that transformed political culture, social movements, law, and foreign policy. Human Rights in Canada is one of the first sociological studies of human rights in Canada. It explains that human rights are a distinct social practice, and it documents those social conditions that made human rights significant at a particular historical moment. A central theme in this book is that human rights derive from society rather than abstract legal principles. Therefore, we can identify the boundaries and limits of Canada's rights culture at different moments in our history. Until the 1970s, Canadians framed their grievances with reference to Christianity or British justice rather than human rights. A historical sociological approach to human rights reveals how rights are historically contingent, and how new rights claims are built upon past claims. This book explores governments' tendency to suppress rights in periods of perceived emergency; how Canada's rights culture was shaped by state formation; how social movements have advanced new rights claims; the changing discourse of rights in debates surrounding the constitution; how the international human rights movement shaped domestic politics and foreign policy; and much more. In addition to drawing on secondary literature in law, history, sociology, and political science, this study looked to published government documents, litigation and case law, archival research, newspapers, opinion polls, and materials produced by non-governmental organizations.

When it comes to upholding human rights both at home and abroad, many Canadians believe that we have always been "on the side of the angels." This book tells the story of Canada's contributions - both good and bad - to the development and advancement of international human rights law at the Commission on Human Rights from 1946 to 2006. In it, Canada's reputation is examined through its involvement in a number of contentious human rights issues - political, civil, racial, women's, and Indigenous. An in-depth historical overview of six decades of Canadian engagement within the UN human rights system, this book offers new insights into the nuances, complexities, and contradictions of Canada's human rights policies.

Also Law Stacks 3rd Floor KE5110.B69 2012

Canada has abundant natural wealth, beautiful landscapes, vast forests, and thousands of rivers and lakes. The land defines Canadians as a people, yet the country has one of the industrialized world's worst environmental records. Building on his previous book, The Environmental Rights Revolution (2012), David R. Boyd describes how recognizing the constitutional right to a healthy environment could have a transformative impact by empowering citizens, holding governments and industry accountable, and improving Canada's green record. This important and provocative book provides a road map to protect human health, the well-being of the planet, and the interests of future generations.

Canadians like to see themselves as champions of human rights in the international community. Closer to home, however, the human rights system in Canada - particularly its public institutions such as commissions and tribunals - has been the object of sustained debate and vehement criticism, based largely on widespread myths about how it works. In Speaking Out on Human Rights, Pearl Eliadis explodes these myths, analysing the pervasive distortions and errors on which they depend. Canada's human rights system, a unique legal tradition operating within a powerful modern constitution, is a fundamental mechanism for ensuring the practical application of our national commitment to tolerance and inclusion. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Canada's leading human rights experts and extensive original research, Eliadis explores the evolution of commissions and tribunals as vehicles of public policy and considers their mandate to mediate rights conflicts in such contested areas as hate speech, religious freedoms, and sexuality. She provides a frank assessment of how Canada's human rights system functions and argues that misplaced critiques have prevented urgent and necessary discussions about the reforms that are needed to improve fairness and equality before the law and to ensure institutional independence, impartiality, and competence. Speaking Out on Human Rights shows how our human rights system plays a unique and important role in the rights revolution both in Canada and internationally and offers promising avenues for its future development.