Ideas - Massey Lecture 2: The six years that remade human rights

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

The ideals behind the concept of human rights — such as the sacredness of life, reciprocity, justice and fairness — have millennia-old histories. After the carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, these ideas took a new legal form. In his second Massey Lecture, Alex Neve considers six dizzying years that laid out a blueprint for a new world. Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on the series.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Please join me in welcoming the 2025 Massey Lecture, Alex Neve. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Thank you. That's lovely. That's Alex Neve, walking out on stage at the York Theater in Vancouver to join CBC Radio's Laura Lynch. So let me tell you about Alex Neve, who is someone that I know.

In my previous incarnations of the CBC, I have talked to Alex. many times about human rights in Canada, and I've always appreciated Alex's insight, and particularly his speed in replying when I was on deadline. Alex is a human rights lawyer who served as Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada from 2000 to 2020. So tonight, Alex Neve will be exploring ideas about human rights that we've inherited from past generations. Since their inception in 1961, the CBC Massey Lectures have explored.

some of the most pressing issues of our time. And in today's world, few issues are as pressing as human rights. The need to embrace the full universality of the promise of human rights in our world at a time when our common humanity and even the future of our planet is so desperately frayed and tested. Alex Neves-Massie lectures are called universal, renewing human rights in a fractured world. Fractures that have ruptured the human rights of billions of people. But fractures that can be healed by a true embrace of the universal promise. In such a fractured world, revitalizing the idea of universal human rights may offer a path forward. But to get there, Alex argues we must first look back to where that universal promise began. Lecture two. Go back and go back and

yet it. Human rights lessons from history. And one essential word sets it all in motion. Universal. Constant. Continual. Perpetual. Letitia Manserari and I sat in front of the small wooden shelter in the Massacundu refugee camp, where she lived with several of her children and grandchildren, while she tended to a smoldering fire and a pot of millet porridge. The camp outside the city of Kisidugu was one of many in the Parrotsbeak region, an isolated corner of Guinea in West Africa. It was March 2001. Letitia was in her 60s and had fled from neighboring Sierra Leone several years earlier,

joining thousands of other refugees from both Sierra Leone and Liberia. The horrifying human rights violations that tore those two countries apart during much of the 1990s were soul-destroying. So much of the violence involved children. Brutal abuses against children often carried out under duress by other children. For years, refuge in Guinea was safe, but no longer. As the conflict had shifted in Sierra Leone,

fighters with that country's notorious rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, had crossed the border. And no one was safe. certainly not refugees. The security situation was tense with constant rumors of RUF attacks in the area. Guinean security forces had started to view Sierra Leonean refugees with suspicion, even though they were the ones

with the most to fear from the rebels. There had been an arbitrary sweep through the camp the day before, and local gendarmes had arrested dozens of refugees on groundless accusations that they were supporting the rebels. Fear was palpable everywhere we went in the camp. At one point, while I was sitting with Letitia, there was a commotion next door.

A man who had been arrested in the previous day's sweep had been released and returned to his family. We took a break to hear his account. Ominously, he warned that the welcome that refugees had enjoyed in Guinea was wearing off. Leticia knew the toll of Sierra Leone's war firsthand. Her husband had been killed years earlier by the RUF when their village was attacked. Other family members had been badly injured at various times.

She did not know what had become of her nephew, who, while still a young boy, had been abducted and had likely been forced to join the rebels' fighting ranks. They were known to recruit and kill thousands of children. Now, as they carried out attacks in Guinea, Letitia was above all fearful that her grandchildren, would meet the same fate as her nephew. I could tell that she was not letting them out of her sight.

Letitia was holding her family together. Among my many questions, I asked Letitia, what changes in Sierra Leone would make it safe enough to return home? I was looking ahead, but she was clear in her answer. In order to be sure about where we need to go, we have to understand where we have come from. The lawyer and human rights researcher in me was focused on passing UN Security Council resolutions, strengthening UN peacekeeping, and prosecuting war criminals.

Letitia reminded me, though, that if any of those measures were to succeed, first we needed to look back to history. She was a compelling storyteller. She shared vivid accounts of how the fighting she had fled in Sierra Leone revolved around control of the country's lucrative diamond fields. She took me back to a time when her own father illicitly mined for diamonds in Kono in the east of the country, hopeful that a significant find might lift their family out of poverty. She talked of the various international mining companies that had come and gone

generally leaving communities in worse shape. She recounted when control of the diamond fields was wrested away by the rebels. That is when the violence became so extreme that her family had to flee. she explained it has always been about the diamonds everyone has always cared about the diamonds and no one has ever cared about us it was obvious to her that unless that long history was addressed and there was as much care for people as there was for diamonds nothing would change we have to understand where we have come from That is more important than ever at a time when we feel off balance and lost as we are faced with the urgent, violent, and existential challenges in front of us today. Letitia's wise counsel reminds us that as we seek the way forward, we must consider what has come before and what lessons that may offer.

What pressing questions about human rights do we face today, the answers to which may lie in looking back into history? Where does the very notion of a human right come from? Is it innate and universal or is it largely a political or legal construct? What does it encompass? And is that static or does it evolve? Why is there such a strong impulse to talk of rights when we consider the human condition? Why do we continue to strive for human rights even when they are so regularly and cavalierly violated? And what if the relationship between rights and What does the human rights promise call on each of us to do or not to do for one another? Looking back, the origins of our human rights journey would likely lie 10,000 or more years ago with the unrecorded first act of unsolicited kindness from one human to another. It likely seemed unremarkable in the moment, but that first flicker of kindness has evolved and been given. stirring expression, been probed, reaffirmed, and challenged over the millennia since, but it has survived.

We see that in religious, spiritual, and indigenous teachings, in the reflections of philosophers, and absolutely in the proclamations of rebellion and revolution. As we look back, there are core values that emerge, the fertile ground in which the universal human rights promise has taken root. That includes the sacredness of life, our common humanity, respect and reciprocity, and fairness and freedom. Let me start at the very beginning, literally. Across time, across religions, cultures, and peoples, human creation parables are all drenched in life's sacredness.

In Maori tradition, Tane, the god of the forest, and all that lives in it, created the natural world. He molded Haini Ahuone, the first woman, from sacred red clay. Tane breathed life into her through a sacred exchange of breath, and thus the spirit entered her body, symbolizing the divine connection between humans, the gods, and the earth. In the Navajo creation story, the holy people used sacred white corn to make the first man,

and sacred yellow corn, the first woman. A holy wind, representing the divine breath of life that exists in all living things, brought life to the corn. The sacredness of life is reinforced in the many religious and spiritual commandments not to kill and to save life. The Quran teaches that whoever kills a soul has killed all of humanity. The principle of Ahimsa from a Sanskrit word meaning without violence is one of the highest truths in Hinduism and Jynism. Judaism in Christianity's Sixth Commandment is unambiguous.

Thou shall not kill. The sacred primacy of life comes through in stories told by philosophers. Menchus, a disciple of Confucius, told the tale of King Hui, who asked Menchus how he could make his realm prosper, believing the answer lay in military might. Menchus, but Menchus, challenged the king's priorities, noting that his people were suffering. The king's granaries were full, yet the people were starving. His treasury overflowed with riches, yet the people were cold and without clothing. Menchus told the king that to neglect the lives and well-being of his people, while enriching himself, was like trying to fill a leaking pond without stopping the leak. It will never be full. Life must come first.

Little surprise, then, that in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we find everyone has the right to life. We must ask ourselves, though, how have we come to live in a world that allows life's sacredness to be so readily defiled and desecrated in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and countless other conflict zones? Do we understand what it is for a life, every life, truly to be sacred? Our journey has gone beyond cherishing the sacredness of each individual life. We have embraced a deep understanding that we are all dependent upon one another, and we are all inextricably interconnected. Our own sacred lives are intricately bound up together in common humanity. It is here that in many ways, the universal dimension of human rights has its most foundational expression.

One of the most concise expressions of our common humanity is found in the African concept of Ubuntu. I am because we are. Ubuntu's origins are said to lie in a Zulu proverb, which affirms that a person is a person through other people. The idea of our common humanity has also been embraced in philosophical conceptions of natural justice and rights in Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. Emmanuel Kant stirringly captured the universal solidarity that lies at the heart of our common humanity, crying out that a transgression of rights in one place in the world is felt everywhere. Writing during the Enlightenment, those philosophers, mostly men, were by no means. universally inclusive in their vision of common humanity,

generally focusing only on themselves, most likely property-owning white men of means, but others, writing at the same time and far too often overlooked today, lifted up a truly universal vision of our common humanity, including Olymp de Guzge, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in France,

And in England, Mary Wollstonecrafts a vindication of the rights of women and the powerful memoir, the interesting narrative of the life of Olauda Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa, the African. Martin Luther King, Jr., offers what I have always felt to be one of the most evocative images of our common humanity. In his speech, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, The rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich.

A single garment of destiny is a wonderful metaphor for our common humanity. A singular garment that we wear together made up of a rich tapestry of individual threads. Each thread on its own can be easily broken, but interwoven, they become strong and beautiful with a united destiny and shared purpose. That single garment of destiny is indeed the universal promise of human rights.

And what of that common humanity today? Look to the Mediterranean, where our common humanity is both grievously lost and shining bright. With borders closed, for many refugees, those seas have become a graveyard as their unsafe, overcrowded boats capsize. Common humanity cruelly denied. But look also to the thousands of people from more than 40 countries pushing forward on 50 ships, collectively, the global Sumud Flotilla,

intent on piercing Israel's unlawful genocidal blockade of Gaza, common humanity embraced. Recognition that life is sacred and that we share a common humanity compels us to treat one another with respect and reciprocity. The sacredness of life and the strength of our common humanity will rise or fall on the back of how much respect we resupprocity. and how much we offer. That is what motivates the many religious and spiritual expressions, going back millennia, of what is often referred to as the Golden Rule, the principle that we should treat others as we would want to be treated ourselves.

The Golden Rule is foundational in Islam. Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others that which you wish for yourself. In Christianity, you shall love. your neighbor as yourself. And in Judaism, whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. It finds expression in a West African Yoruba proverb, extending that reciprocity to the natural world around us. Whenever a person breaks a stick in the forest, let him consider what it would feel like if it were himself who was thus broken. I feel like that one says so much to us today as both we, humanity, and our planet real from the catastrophic impact of the climate crisis.

Today, my heart goes to the destructive and deadly rampage of super typhoon Ragasa, tearing through the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. U.S. historian Paul Gordon-Loran beautifully suggests that all of the great religious traditions share a universal dissatisfaction with the world as it is and a determination to make it as it ought to be. It is not only a religious perspective, it has become the catalyst for social and political movements through the ages. How often have many of us been out in the streets shouting along with others, the hopeful and insistent chant of social justice.

A better world is possible. Fairness and freedom have long been signposts to what that better world ought to be. The presumption of innocence, for instance, a basic human rights safeguard of fairness first appears 3,800 years ago in ancient Babylonia's Code of Hammurabi. The Magna Carta, more than 800 years ago,

established that no one, even the monarch, is above the law, and that no one can be detained without lawful judgment. In 1762, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the opening line of his seminal work, the social contract, issued his famous rallying cry. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. In quick succession, revolutions in the United States, France and Haiti powerfully took up. that desire to break the chains, and the language of human rights emerged like never before, not only capturing, but constitutionally enshrining that yearning for fairness and freedom. Across the globe, that yearning is irrepressible and ultimately invincible,

despite the determined efforts of governments to extinguish and crush it. Tonight, I am thinking of Egyptian British activist Allah Abdul-Fatah, who has long refused to be silent to injustice in Egypt and has paid a very high price in fairness and freedom. Years ago, at the Al Jazeera studio in London, he told me that even with everything he had endured, he would not change a thing and how bolstered he felt by global solidarity. He has again unfairly and unlawfully been denied his freedom for the past six years.

His courageous mother, Lila, has waged hunger strikes to win his freedom. People the world over have demanded his freedom. And now finally, he is free. If only, we could end there. Perhaps unexpectedly, considerable encouragement can be drawn from looking back. Life is sacred. live in common humanity. We owe and must treat each other with respect, and we are guided by fairness and freedom. Imagine my conversation with Letitia if those were the principles that

truly shaped her world, our world, in 2001. Surely the Revolutionary United Front, the mining companies, local security forces would have all behaved differently. Surely she would not be fearful of letting her grandchildren out of her sight, the world as it ought to be, not as it is. While looking back brings these principles to life, we see also how wantonly they are dishonored. No matter our unshakable determination to keep faith with and even strengthen human rights promises, humanity's capacity for violence, cruelty, and subjugation has also prevailed. which invites one of the most basic existential questions of humanity. Are we inherently good or inherently evil?

Is our journey one of goodness seeking to keep evil away or evil striving towards better selves? This was the great debate thousands of years ago between Confucian philosophers Mencius, who was of the view that human nature is good, and Junji, who held the conscience. view that human nature is bad. All is not lost, however, as Junji also held that people desire to become good because their

nature is bad. To reach that goal, Junji said people need help from outside forces. Is that not precisely what the universal promise of human rights offers? Scaffolding to hold our better selves in place. It is telling that repeated betrayals of our ideals have not squelched our belief in the promise. Betrayal has, in fact, often fueled new and greater resolve. It has inspired the next philosopher or profit and catalyzed the next revolution. Along the way, the difference between right and wrong and between just and unjust has become more apparent.

And this pendulum swings over the centuries. The racist conquest of 500 years of colonialism, for instance, ignited the fight to abolish slavery. The pendulum certainly swung between good and evil through the early part of the 20th century when in quick succession the First World War, the Spanish flu pandemic, and the Great Depression unleashed catastrophic death and suffering.

These were followed, however, by treaties to end the First World War, which included historic provisions for the protection of minorities, the establishment of the League of Nations, and the permanent International Court of Justice. Canada responded to the influenza pandemic by creating our first ever federal Department of Health. And the ravages of the Great Depression in the United States inspired Franklin Roosevelt to launch the ambitious New Deal,

a seismic shift in understanding the role of governments in providing a basic level of economic security for everyone. What followed next, however, was the pendulum's most vicious swing. You're listening to the second of the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Every day, your eyes are working overtime. From squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late night. drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why

regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan, advanced technology that helps your optometrists detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.ca.cavers.cai Ayesams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often.

You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough, defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at Lovescarbro.cairbo.ca.a. The ideals behind the concept of human rights, such as reciprocity, fairness, and the sacredness of life have millennia old histories. After the carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, human rights took a new legal form. In the second of his CBC Massey lectures, Alex Neve considers the six dizzying years that laid out a blueprint for a new world, and the wisdom, challenges, and tensions we've inherited from them.

From the York Theatre in Vancouver, here again is Alex Neve with Go Back and Get It, Human Rights Lessons from History. The carnage of the Second World War reached all corners of the earth. 72 million civilians and soldiers were killed. But the lives of six million Jews and others were extinguished in the Holocaust showed us that there were no limits to the horrors humans were prepared to inflict upon each other, and to do so hiding in plain sight of nearby communities and the world at large normalized through banal laws and macabre record-keeping.

How could that have not demolished even the slightest faith anyone might have held that promises of our common humanity meant anything? The global landscape was riddled with calamity in those post-war years, including unprecedented levels of forced displacement and national economies in tatters, with overwhelming shortages of food, fuel,

and other essentials that, if anything, became worse in peacetime. And the catastrophic implications of the nuclear age had dawned. Setsuko Thurlow was 13 when the U.S. military dropped the world's first nuclear bomb on her city, Hiroshima, Japan. And then before anyone could comprehend what had happened, a second bomb was dropped three days later on the city of Nagasaki. I have heard her on several occasions describe the horror that was unleashed literally in the flash of a moment. While she was at school, she talks viscerally of being surrounded by the charred bodies and disembodied limbs of her own family and 351 schoolmates.

An estimated 210,000 people were killed in the two cities from just two bombs. thousands more were to die from the effects of radiation over the decades to come. 80 years later, Setsuko asks, how could anyone have believed that it was in the best interest of humanity to have the capability to carry out unspeakable, unthinkable, instantaneous mass murder? And did anyone think about how to constrain us once we had those deadly means? Former Canadian Member of Parliament, Senator and Ambassador of Disarmament, Douglas Roach, was 16 years old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

He was at the kitchen table with his parents and heard the news on CBC Radio. With predictions the war would be over in days. Decades later, Doug is one of Canada's most impassioned advocates for the abolition of nuclear weapons. As he puts it, if only we had been able to understand at the time that our world was about to give birth to the real possibility of creating our own apocalypse and then stepped back from that precipice. Today, we stand with one foot over that precipice, a world awash with 12,000 nuclear weapons, while states actually modernize those apocalyptic arsenals. Even if they couldn't yet fully grasp the horrors and dangers they faced, in the ruins of the Second World War, people understood that humanity stood on that precipice,

and thus the need for a turning point. Speaking to representatives of 50 countries in April, 1945, at the opening of a two-month conference in San Francisco, tasked with designing the blueprint for a post-war international, order, U.S. President Harry Truman laid out the path. Justice remains the greatest power on earth, he said, to that tremendous power alone will we submit. Six months later, on October the 24th, 1945, the war had ended, and the United Nations and the International Court of Justice officially came into existence. This raw, violent

moment in human history could so easily have been a time to retreat to Victor's triumph, bigger armies, fortified borders, unilateralism, and domination. It could understandably have been a time to become inward-looking, defiant and defensive. Yet instead, in the first article of the charter, laying out the United Nations four primary purposes, human rights are in the spotlight like never before, to achieve international cooperation in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, religion. And notably, the Charter was not written in the voice of presidents, royalty, and generals,

nor of nations, states, or governments. Instead, it opens in the name of we the peoples of the United Nations. An earlier draft used the more traditional and dull international legal terminology of a charter being enacted by high contracting parties. The soaring, almost oratorical language of we the peoples came from the U.S. delegation,

echoing similar words that begin the U.S. Constitution. And notably, the inspiration for those words came from Virginia Gildersleeve, the only woman on the U.S. delegation in San Francisco and one of the very few women on any country's delegation, along with Soul Bloom, the only Jewish member of the U.S. delegation. We the peoples set the stage for the aspiration and promise of human beings, rights to carry more solemn significance and weight. And what was it that the people were declaring?

It was our determination to achieve four vital goals, to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to maintain justice and respect for international law, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. Having created the United Nations and doing so in the name of we the peoples, states set out at a frenzied pace now to demonstrate their determination to bring the promise of human rights concretely to life. It was something the world had never witnessed before. And what guided their effort is a vision that both teaches us and illuminates much of what we confront today.

In the span of only six years, absolutely inconceivable in the glacial pace of today's multilateral world, they took decisive and historic steps to advance international justice, tackle genocide, commit to universal human rights, protect civilians in times of war, and protect refugees. entrenched impunity has long been the great ally of human rights violators. As early as 1943, however, the U.S., British and Soviet governments had agreed that German officers and members of the Nazi Party, who were responsible for atrocities, massacres, and cold-blooded mass executions, should face justice and be punished for their crimes. Once the war ended, steps were taken, almost immediately, to deliver on that promise, later extended to Japan as well. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals were set up in 1945 and 1946.

Over several years, more than 200 German and Japanese military officers, political leaders, professionals, and industrialists were tried on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It was in fact the first time in history that individuals had been charged and tried with the new offense of crimes against humanity, defined as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds. Notably, the focus of crimes against humanity was entirely on civilians, whereas war crimes, to that point in time, had largely focused on soldiers, particularly when wounded or taken prisoner. The Nuremberg Tribunal ruled that the persecution of the Jews at the hands of the Nazi

government had been proved in the greatest detail before the tribunal. It is a record of consistent and systematic inhumanity on the greatest scale. This was a watershed moment. The universality of human rights was, for the first time ever, being enforced through the power of law. A strong message that delivering the promise of human rights required justice and accountability for egregious violations. However, this did not mean that international justice was going to be universal justice. It was decidedly left to the victors to dispense justice, which did not, extend to themselves.

There was certainly no move to consider criminal charges against U.S. and British officials responsible for the firestorm bombing of the German city of Dresden, U.S. leaders who decided to drop those cataclysmic nuclear bombs on Japan, or Soviet officers who carried out mass executions of Polish prisoners of war at Cateen, all of which could credibly have given rise to charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity. It was nonetheless history-making to see that international justice had arrived on the world stage,

though it would be decades before states returned to it and began to truly take it forward, notably through establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002. The imperative to not be selective and to go the distance in delivering universal justice, is still very much in front of us in 2025, well evidenced by the fact that while two-thirds of the world states have endorsed the court, one-third have not, including the United States, Russia, China, Israel, and India.

Justice, well promised to us all, clearly does not yet belong to us all. the powerful new definition of crimes against humanity articulated in 1945 did not however fully capture the scale and horror of the holocaust in a speech in 1941 as awareness grew of the rounding up transportation by rail detention in concentration camps and extermination in gas chambers of jews and others whom adolf hitler had targeted for elimination Winston Churchill noted that the world was in the presence of a crime without a name. A Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, had remarked similarly in response to earlier unimaginable atrocities, the massive orchestrated massacres of Armenians in Turkey during the First World War under Ottoman Empire rule. At the time, Lemkin wondered, why was killing a million people a less serious?

crime than killing a single individual. Raphael Lempkin fled from Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, eventually reaching the United States. And he was determined that a new offense under international law was needed to capture the true nature of what he called the most heinous of all crimes. He termed it genocide. On December 9th, 1948, in one of the UN's first instances of significant lawmaking, the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide

was adopted. Genocide was coined and defined for the first time in international law as extending to five specified acts, killing, serious bodily or mental harm, destructive conditions of life, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children, when committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The crime that had no name now had one. The genocide convention packs a remarkable amount into its relatively short 19 articles.

There is a focus on obligations to both prevent and punish genocide, obligations that rest with all state parties, not just the government carrying out the genocide, And there is a clear obligation to prosecute those who commit genocide, which applies to anyone responsible, regardless of whether they are a ruler, official, or a private individual. But the Convention is intent on preventing genocide, not only responding to it after the fact, is essential. To Armenians and to Jews, and to all humanity, a promise had been made, too late to address the horrors of the past, but so necessary to avoid similar horrors in the future.

Never again. There is a less encouraging footnote to the story of the drafting of the genocide convention, namely, whether or not it would specifically outlaw cultural genocide. Lemkin asserted that genocide encompassed more than mass killings. In his view, it also occurred when there was a coordinated plan of different actions, aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, including the disintegration of the culture and language of the group. Canadian officials, even in 1948, were aware that cultural genocide very likely encompassed this country's treatment of indigenous peoples. And so Canada joined other countries in objecting to including such a provision in the convention.

They succeeded, and it was cut from an early draft. Explicitly included in the convention or not, 67 years later, the final report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission made it clear that Canada was indeed responsible for cultural genocide, concluding that for over a century, the central goals of Canada's Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments, ignore Aboriginal rights,

terminate the treaties, and through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as cultural genocide. So looking back, reminds us there is unfinished business today. The history of genocide against indigenous peoples in Canada

has been both physical and cultural. We are not spared that reality by having expunged the reference to cultural genocide from the convention in 1948. And 80 years after there was a promise to end genocide, we are forced to face its horrors in Gaza, against the Rohingya, and in other corners of our world. So going back gives us an opportunity to recuperate and to keep the promise. The day after adopting the genocide convention, the United Nations took another enormous step, one sat on firmly placing human rights at the heart of the emerging new world order.

On December the 10th, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. For the first time in history, a legal document had been proclaimed, laying out the rights and freedoms of all peoples throughout the world. In its preamble, the Declaration observes 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.

A powerful affirmation that respecting human rights is not only its own imperative, but is also a cornerstone to other goals, notably world peace. The very first word in the Declaration's title, Universal, commits clearly and succinctly to the promise of common humanity.

To use that term, rather than the words more usually seen in the titles of treaties and declarations, such as international or perhaps United Nations, is of note and was certainly deliberate. It is an ode to our common humanity. That sense of universality is given full legal force in the first article,

which declares that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, and the second article, which affirms that everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this declaration without distinction of any kind. All, everyone, without distinction. This vision of universality was shaped by the millennia that had come before. For example, Chinese diplomat PC Chang, who was a key member of the drafting committee frequently referenced 2,500-year-old Confucian teachings and ideals in support of the declarations, principles, and wording. In arguing for social and economic rights provisions to be included, which they were in articles 22 through 26, he noted

that when the grand way prevails, the world is for the welfare of all. People regard not only their own parents as parents, nor only their own children as children. All of that said, Canada had a less than stellar beginning with the Universal Declaration. In the first vote leading up to the eventual adoption of the Declaration, rather than vote in favor, Canada's delegation abstained. In doing so, we were out of step with our closest allies, including the United Kingdom and the United States. The vote was cast by Lester Pearson, who was Canada's Secretary of State for External Affairs at the time

and would, of course, go on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 and become Prime Minister in 1963. The official explanation offered for that initial abstention was that some of the declaration's provisions touched on matters that came within provincial jurisdiction. making it a difficult instrument to support. I assure you, decades later, governments in Canada continue to assert that federalism complicates Canada's ability

to comply with our international human rights obligations. However, government and parliamentary correspondence and records from this time reveal that federalism was not the whole story, and that Canada's lack of enthusiasm was also tied to misgivings about many of the declaration-specific provisions, including that freedom of religion would extend to Jehovah's Witnesses, that freedom of movement and non-discrimination might have constrained the ability to intern Japanese Canadians during the war, and that democratic

rights might mean status Indians were entitled to vote. A joint committee of the House of Commons and the Senate had been established. to review Canada's position on the declaration while it was being drafted. At one of those sessions, the committee's chair, J.L. Ilseley, Minister of Justice at the time, observed, somewhere in these articles, there is the right of movement of citizens within their own country. And if you wish to have a law preventing a movement of the Japanese from one part of the country to the other,

which we have at the present time, it could well be argued. it is contrary to this declaration. In October 1948, in the lead-up to the final votes on the declaration, Louis Saint-Laurent, who was acting Prime Minister at the time, added a personal note in a cable sent to Canada's UN delegation, which gives a sense of the level of consternation within the government. Saint-Laurent was particularly concerned that the combined impact of articles dealing with the right to work

and the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and freedom of assembly could be interpreted as an undertaking not to discriminate against communists because of their political views. He was also concerned that the right to education in Article 26 might be interpreted as obliging a state to provide higher education to everyone at the cost of the state if he cannot pay for it. Canada did come around. Canada did vote in favor of the declaration when it was subsequently adopted in plenary

by the General Assembly. But this was not an auspicious initial foray for Canada into the world of universal human rights. In many ways, that ambivalent start still haunts us today. A year after the declaration, in 1949, under the watchful supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the four Geneva Conventions were adopted. The conventions built on earlier treaties that had proven inadequate and immediately became the centerpiece of the growing body

of the international humanitarian law, often termed the laws of war, dealing with the wounded and sick, the shipwrecked, prisoners of war, and the protection of civilians. One of the most consequential provisions in the conventions is what came to be known as common Article 3. It was included in identical language in all four of the treaties,

and it established the legal principle that in armed conflicts that were not of an international character, in other words, internal armed conflicts or civil wars, persons taking no active part in the hostilities, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely. More specifically, the provision clarified that humane treatment should protect civilians from violence to life and person, such as murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and hostage-taking.

This marked the first multilateral treaty to lay out obligations for civilian protection when a conflict was being waged not between two sovereign nations, but entirely within one country. It was a momentous intrusion beyond what had always been seen as the inviolable sovereign borders of a state. For the first time, international law was setting limits in a binding treaty on how a state could treat its own people during a conflict playing out solely within its own frontiers.

In doing so, states had essentially agreed that universality would transcend borders. The reach of the human rights promise was growing. But what then do we make today of the shelling bombardment and targeted drone attacks against civilians in hospitals in Kanunis? Backyards in Kersan, displaced persons camps in Goma and markets in Torah Village. The promise to civilians that they will be protected during war is crucial with untold millions of lives at the war. stake. It is a promise that has been reiterated and affirmed countless times, but it is a promise so viciously and brazenly broken that humanitarian organizations such as Med Saint-Frontier and UN agencies have launched online civilian protection campaigns using the hashtag, not a target.

Next, in this remarkable run of post-war lawmaking, the UN adopted the convention relating to the status of refugees in 1951. After the Second World War, millions of refugees were stranded across Europe. The convention opens by reaffirming the principle enshrined in both the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration, namely that human beings shall enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms without discrimination, and assures refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms. It then enumerates specific rights of refugees in such areas as freedom of movement, detention, employment, healthcare, education, social security, and most crucially, the protection against refoulement, being returned to a country,

where a refugee's life for freedom would be threatened. Often overlooked is the convention's crucial recognition expressed in the preamble that the challenges inherent in refugee protection are of international scope and nature and, quote, cannot therefore be achieved without international cooperation. The human rights promise had been extended to refugees, so often left to the margins of any sense of common humanity, with explicit acknowledgement of the importance of states working together to deliver that promise.

This cooperation seems a distant promise today for refugees and migrants being vilified by politicians around the world, dying in capsized boats in the Mediterranean, sent to prisons around the world by Donald Trump, and facing a hostile reception along Canada's border with the United States. We must consider who was at the table making these historic human rights decisions and who was not. In 1948, there were only 58 members of the United Nations compared to 193 today. There were only four member states from Africa, one of which was.

apartheid era, South Africa. Three Caribbean island states were part of the United Nations in 1948, 13 are today. Six of the 25 most populous nations in the world in 2025, Indonesia,

Nigeria, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, and Tanzania, not members, in 1948. Huge swaths of the planet remained under colonial rule and were denied independent representation

within this significant new world body. But even with the blatantly, unequal, unjust, and racist composition of the United Nations in 1948, with delegations usually entirely made up of men who held the bulk of the world's economic, political, and military power, the member states consistently and overwhelmingly voted in favor of the promise of universal human rights. No state voted against the declaration itself, with only the Soviet Union and its five closest allies,

along with Saudi Arabia and South Africa, abstaining on the final vote. At the same time that they crafted this stirring global vision committing to respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, they perversely imagined they could maintain the repressive boundaries of colonialism. In a way, that blatant contradiction makes the declaration even more consequential. As we all know, the journey does not end with a magnificent sense of completion in 1951, with the adoption of the Refugee Convention, at which point we can confidently conclude that the world had successfully committed to the promise of universal human rights. There are turbulent twists and turns yet to come over the decades to follow,

with many moments that expanded and solidified the promise, and many others that obliterated faith that the promise had any meaning at all. As looking back, taught or reminded us of anything that speaks to us today, what do we see if we compare what led up to those six incredible post-war years with our world today, 1945 versus 2025. Devastating wars and mass atrocities, including genocide, chasms of hate, fear and division, massive displacement, economic strain and despair, the ravages of pandemics, the specter of nuclear destruction, existential questions about the planet's survival. So many of the same descriptors.

Of course, there are differences in the scale, immediacy and nature of the threats, And geopolitically, the times are very different. But the sense of overwhelming challenges is surely not dissimilar. The contours are different, but we do indeed find ourselves in a similar time. And thus, should we not similarly take on board the world's impulse 80 years ago to turn to the promise of human rights? And is it not clear that the heart of that promise was then and must, be today, its universality, that it extends to everyone and excludes no one. Eighty years ago, states agreed to groundbreaking legal provisions touching on a wide range

of human rights. They made it clear that human rights violators should be held accountable for their crimes. They agreed to a specific framework for preventing and punishing genocide. They set out detailed obligations to govern the conduct of war, including groundbreaking rules applicable to civilians in internal armed conflicts, and they established a new global regime for protecting refugees. Certain core principles guided those efforts. Human rights are foundational to peace and security in our world. Human rights are universal, meaning all people, all rights, and all times. Human rights violations can and must be prevented. Upholding human rights necessitates international cooperation, and without justice and

accountability, the promise of human rights will remain precarious. I imagine a young Jewish girl who survived Auschwitz and a Japanese grandfather who emerged alive in Nagasaki, the only members of their families not to have been killed. I wonder about a young girl whose father was killed by Israeli shelling at a food distribution site in Gaza, or the families of three First Nations women whose bodies were discarded in Winnipeg landfills. Would they understandably look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with indifference, skepticism, or even despair, convinced that the promise was only for others. In 1948, might they have seen the first glimmer of a shining new promise of human rights

that might offer universal hope? And in 2025, would they not scoff at the very idea of universality? Their sense of doubt would have been more than justified then, and has been unfortunately proven well-found over the decades that have followed. With this understanding of where we have come from, what might we take on board going forward? That 80 years ago, facing a world of deep division, global threats, and myriad crises, not unlike the world of 2025,

states had both the insight and the foresight to put universality, equality, prevention, protection, justice, and cooperation at the heart of the human rights they crafted. The framers of the Declaration drew on widely held principles that cherish the sacredness of life and our common humanity and are grounded in the importance of respect and reciprocity and fairness and freedom in making those promises.

They understood that the promise of universal human rights was foundational to achieving peace. That promise is underwent. undeniably as essential now as it was then. Let us not forget that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, yes, for all of us, but equally it is about all of us. We are entitled to expect our governments and institutions to uphold our human rights, but additionally, the Declaration makes it clear that we are expected to play a part

in delivering the human rights promise. If we do not step up individually and collectively to guarantee and deliver that promise universally, it will continue to falter and may ultimately collapse. But it is not only that we have that responsibility, we have that power. The UN Charter is, after all, in the name of we the peoples. And that is why, in Egypt, Allah Abdel Fata is free and with his family. Perhaps above all, that is what? Having looked back, we must now take forward.

Thank you. Human rights lawyer Alex Neath, taking in the raucous applause of a sold-out audience at Vancouver's York Theater. For his lecture, Go Back and Get It, human rights lessons from history. It's the second of his 2025 CBC Massey lectures. In his third lecture, Alex will explore

two crucial aspects of human rights, that they're inherent, which means they belong to us from birth, and that they're inalienable, which means no one can take them away. I think we are all grateful to have benefited from Alex's demonstrable display of both passion and intelligence and caring. So a huge thank you to you, Alex Neve, to our co-sponsors, House of Ananzi Press and Massey College. And a warm thank you to the CBC's Laura Lynch and Matthew Laysen Rider in Vancouver. as well as the staff of the York Theatre.

You can get the entire 2025 CBC Massey Lecture Series at cbc.ca.ca slash Massies after November 21st. You can also stream episodes through the CBC News app or download the lectures from your favorite podcast app. Visit your local bookseller for the book version of the lectures titled Universal Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World. The CBC Massey Lecture Series is produced, by Pauline Holesworth. Special thanks to Annie Bender. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical

production, Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of the Massey lectures and ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.