Ideas - Massey Lecture Part 3 | Human rights don’t have to be earned

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Our inherent human rights belong to us from the moment we are born. There is nothing we need to do to earn them, and they are supposed to apply to us until the day we die. But in his third Massey Lecture, Alex Neve argues the powerful have made human rights a ‘club.’ Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on this lecture 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. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. I'm Tara McCarthy, host of Edmonton A.M. on CBC Radio 1. It's such a privilege to host this evening for the third installment of the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures. Universal, Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World by Alex Neve. As Alex Neve stood on the stage in Edmonton, he encouraged his audience to turn their game.

away from him and toward each other. There is so much despair and worry in the air. I know that. You know that. We all know that. We feel it every day. I want to begin, therefore, by asking everyone, just to take a minute, to look around you,

beside you, in front of you, behind you, look across the theater, and draw strength and inspiration from the fact that hundreds of us, have come together this evening for one simple reason. We are concerned about and we very deeply care about our collective human rights. Alex Neves 2025 CBC Massey Lectures are called Universal, renewing human rights in a fractured world.

This can be an evening of powerful solidarity. I'm so grateful for your presence and your company as the embodiment of that solidarity. Alex delivered this year's talks across Canada from major urban centers like Edmonton to smaller communities like Happy Valley Goose Bay. For Alex, these are just the latest stops in a decades-long human rights journey. He took part in more than 40 human rights research

and advocacy delegations throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, Guantanamo Bay, and closer to home in First Nations communities in Canada. In this lecture, Alex explores two crucial aspects of the universal human rights promise, that there's nothing we need to do to earn our rights, and that there's nothing that can take them away from us. So now, lecture three, inherent and inalienable. Human rights are not earned.

Once again, Alex begins with the one word that holds so many meanings. Universal, done, given or made by all, without exception. In August of 2023, I arrived in Kamisly, a small city in northeast Syria along the Turkish border. As part of a Canadian civil society delegation, the security situation was tense, with frequent attacks by the Turkish military and worry about ISIS sleeper cells. We were seeking access to 23 Canadians, 13 of them children, who had been unlawfully detained in camps and prisons for as long as six years. None of them had been charged with an offense. They had no access to lawyers. Their detention conditions were harsh and dangerous.

There was a constant risk of violence and abuse from guards and other detainees. There was not enough food, and health care was minimal. The camps and prisons were desperately overcrowded, and tuberculosis was rampant. There had been little access to the region for journalists and researchers. Their stories, which were both complicated and compelling, were simply not being told. More than 60,000 foreign nationals from some 60 countries were being held in similar circumstances, over half of them children. They had been rounded up when the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic forces, backed by the United States, defeated ISIS, which had been responsible for unspeakable atrocities during the five years of its self-proclaimed caliphate in parts of Syria and Iraq.

Many of the male prisoners were indeed ISIS militants and had been responsible for heinous crimes. But in those same prisons were other men and boys who had no connection or had even opposed ISIS. In the camps, alongside women who were committed followers of ISIS were others who were its victims, including many who had been trafficked into the region, and even Yazidi refugees who had fled ISIS in Iraq because Syria seemed marginally safer. Again, well over half were children. In this cauldron of insecurity and injustice, the Canadian government was refusing to provide its citizens with consular support or to bring them home where they could, if appropriate, be tried in Canadian courts. The prevailing sentiment tarred everyone with one lazy narrative of guilt.

They knew the risks of traveling to Syria and now had to face the consequences. We were given access to all the women and children, but only two of the nine men we had asked to see. I asked one of those men if he was experiencing any health problems. He said that he was, but when I asked if he could tell us more, he quietly said, not now, not here. His reluctance was understandable. Prison guards were in the room. We learned nothing about the fate of the other.

seven men, their names written on the first page of my notebook, haunted me then, and still do. Northeast Syria was not ruled from Damascus. The de facto governing authority was the autonomous administration of North and East Syria. We had several meetings with local officials, including a lengthy session with two individuals who had the daunting responsibility of delivering justice in those conditions. The area was ravaged by war and surrounded by security threats, its infrastructure had been destroyed and economy ruined, and lawyers and judges had been killed or displaced to other countries. Yet these officials were expected to bring tens of thousands of people to justice. In evident need of assistance, the administration had asked foreign

governments, including Canada, to take their nationals back and deliver justice at home. That request was largely rebuffed. They asked states to set up an international tribunal to try the most serious cases, but there was no interest. They asked for resources to support local trials, but very little was forthcoming. Amina, a senior judge overseeing this caseload, was clear that the task would be immensely difficult. Remarkably, she was equally clear about the human rights principles she intended to abide by, including that every accused would have a lawyer, trials would be fair, there would be a right to appeal, and there would be no resort to the death penalty. She told us that delivering justice in northeast Syria had to be true to the

universal declaration of human rights. I had not arrived in northeast Syria expecting anyone to reference the universal declaration in our meetings. I wrote her stirring words in my notebook, but with question marks. For while it was encouraging to hear the declaration referenced as a source of truth at that, at the same time it was being wholly disregarded by local officials and a host of nations, including Canada, who had decided that thousands of men, women, and children, simply did not deserve those rights. Those question marks have only become more pointed, tragically so. When our team was in Raj, the smaller of two sprawling and overcrowded detention camps in the region,

we interviewed F.J., a Canadian woman, and her six young children. It was obvious that they were a close family, yet the Canadian government had told FJ they would arrange for the children to return to Canada, but not her. She had not been accused of any crime, but her views were apparently considered too radical. Thus, she was to be exiled. F.J. was forced to choose between keeping her children with her in dire conditions in the camp, and sending them to safety in Canada with no certainty of ever being reunited with them. Months after our visit, she made a desperate escape from the camp, leaving her children with someone she trusted.

She crossed into Turkey, where she likely hoped to reach the Canadian embassy, obtain a passport, and travel to Canada. She assumed that Canadian officials would quickly repatriate her children, which they did. But FJ was detained at the border by Turkish authorities who laid criminal charges against her. On October the 15th, 2024, a Turkish court acquitted her of those charges, increasing her chances of returning to Canada. But two days later, she was found dead in her prison cell. Troubling questions about how and why remain unanswered. an unbelievably tragic outcome to a broken human rights promise.

Back in Syria, conditions in the camps have worsened, particularly following massive U.S. funding cuts for humanitarian assistance. The Trump administration intends to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, which will almost certainly have dramatic implications for stability in the Northeast. And while the overall security situation in Syria has improved following the overthrow of the al-Assad government last year, what that means for the prisons and camps remains uncertain. Meanwhile, the universal human rights of 16 Canadians, seven of them young children, and thousands of others unlawfully locked up, simply do not count.

except that their rights do count. The universal human rights promise extends to everyone who is abandoned in northeast Syria, just as it extends fully to every one of the 8,215,257,129 people in every imaginable corner of our world. It is not a matter of whether they are rich or poor, popular or shunned, innocent or guilty, radical or not citizens or migrants or white or not white. The promise is theirs for one simple reason because they were born. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by recognizing the inherent dignity and the inalienable rights of all members of the human family. The Declaration's first article proclaims that all human

beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. From the moment of birth, there's nothing we need to accomplish before we are deemed to have earned our rights. We do not need to demonstrate that we are worthy. Inherent refers to something that is so embedded in or naturally part of something else as to be inseparable. The necessary companion to rights being inherent is they are inalienable, meaning they cannot be taken away, repudiated, or surrendered. Not only do we not have to earn our rights, we do not lose them. The promise extends to all of us from our first breath to our last. Yet, just as we see in the prisons and detention camps in northeast Syria, human rights are denied and stripped all the time. Avisceral.

the very idea of universality. Take, for example, Hussein Chilil, an imam and human rights advocate from China's western Xinjiang district. He is Uyghur, and China's cruel persecution of the Uyghur people is unrelenting. Hussein had to flee. In the 1990s, he was resettled to Canada as a refugee and became a citizen. In 2006, while visiting his wife's family in neighboring Uzbekistan, Hussein was unlawfully deported to China. He remains imprisoned there, serving a life sentence after a secret of unfair trial.

His family has had no news of his fate since 2017. I have been part of the campaign to win Hussein's freedom since his arrest in Uzbekistan. That included endless requests to meet with China's ambassador to Canada. I wrote letters, sent emails and made phone calls. I rang the doorbell at the embassy. I had intermediaries ask on my behalf. I cornered embassy staff at diplomatic receptions. The requests were ignored until, astonishingly, in 2008,

I was granted half an hour with the ambassador. We met in a formal reception room, side-by-side in armchairs. I made some opening remarks diplomatically, I thought, welcoming some largely meaningless reforms to China's justice system. Eventually, my opportunity to raise Hussein's case presented itself. I made a humanitarian appeal, focusing on the impact of his detention on his family, including four young children. The ambassador's response was blunt. He is Chinese.

We do not recognize his Canadian citizenship. As far as you are concerned, he has no rights. Closer to home, too, inherent and inalienable rights are also disregarded. Pamela George's case featured in Amnesty International's Stolen Sisters report, documenting violence and discrimination against indigenous women in Canada. Two men beat Pamela to death in 1995 after forcing her to perform oral sex. They left her body face down in a muddy ditch. At trial, a witness testified about what those two men told him about the night of the murder.

We drove around, got drunk, and killed this chick. She deserved it. She was Indian. When the white judge gave instructions to the all-white jury, he told them that they should bear in mind that Pamela was indeed a prostitute when deciding whether she had consented to sex. Not that she was the mother of two young children, not that she loved to write poetry, or that she faced grinding poverty, not that she was a proud member of the Sagame First Nation, that she was a proud member of the Sagamay First Nation, that she was. was indeed a prostitute. The two men were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six and half years of imprisonment. They were granted parole after serving half of their sentences. I spoke with a dear friend of Pamela's shortly after the Stolen Sisters report was released.

As she described it, of course the justice system treated her with contempt, even after she was dead. She was indigenous, she was a woman, and she was a sex worker. Those were three strikes against her when it came to human rights. Despite the universal promise, human rights in our world are undeniably a club. Members are welcomed in to enjoy all the benefits. Non-members are left on the outside looking in. Membership is steeped in white, moneyed, patriarchal privilege, exclusion is rooted in racism, sexism, intolerance of difference, and centuries of economic exploitation. And the rules can change. Membership can be suddenly revoked if the powers that be deemed you are no longer worthy.

remarkably though despite the ongoing betrayal of universal human rights its promise has not dimmed far from it universal human rights are present summoned and embraced as a vigilant reminder as solidarity and as a prayer and they provide us with a torch to light the way i have seen the universal declaration if human rights offer a sense of certainty to those strong struggling for rights that have been denied for generation. Gatsi Tzaguas, Ellen Gabriel, is a Ganya Gagaga artist and indigenous human rights and environmental activist, whose courage became well known to Canadians when she was a spokesperson for her people during the 1990 Ghana-Satage and Ghana-Wage siege in Oka, Quebec. When the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed against Mohawk community members who were defending their land, including sacred burial grounds

in the face of a proposed golf course and construction of townhouses. It was a galvanizing moment of resistance for indigenous peoples across Canada and beyond. I met Ellen 10 years later. She often tells me that she has long held the Universal Declaration of Human Rights close.

It offered certainty to her during a tense and volatile time. It was clear to her that Canada's own laws had long treated indigenous peoples as having no rights, to know that the Declaration's universal promise said otherwise has given Ellen the confidence to take a stand and the conviction to stay the course. So why then do we still have a human rights club

which strips billions of people of their inherent inalienable human rights? There are numerous chasms throughout society, across which the universal promise of human rights seems unable to reach, invariably marked by greed, repression, intolerance, or most likely all three. Four that run particularly deep are geopolitics, national security, money, and indifference. Geopolitics have undermined human rights from the world. moment the Cold War descended and international affairs was all about West versus East. The two camps privileged human rights differently. They pointed nuclear warheads, capable of destroying the planet at each other. They fought devastating proxy wars that

killed, injured, and displaced millions. They locked up dissidents, supported death squads, and turned a blind eye to governments that ruthlessly suppressed opponents. All was forgiven as long as states were loyal allies, members of their club. There was never any consideration of long-term consequences of these alliances. During the Soviet Union's illegal occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the U.S. government provided uncritical support to any armed group prepared to engage in resistance. Those groups were themselves responsible for widespread war crimes and crimes against humanity. That strategy bolstered the Afghan Mujahideen insurgency from which the Taliban would later emerge. And so it continues in our world today. Entire peoples are denied or stripped

of their rights because they are on the wrong side of a geopolitical divide. That is certainly the case for Palestinians, Yemenis and Kurds, whose rights are sold short in the tempest of Middle Eastern politics. The rights of millions of Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kongers, Falun Gong practitioners, and democracy activists have been disregarded by governments reluctant to take on an increasingly powerful China. The government in Beijing deflects critics by arguing that universal human rights reflect values that are inherently Western, not Chinese. The perspective from the ground, however, is very different. Sharap Thurchen, a leader in the Tibetan community in Canada,

pushes back eloquently. For the people of Tibet, everything about human rights is universal. To be free to worship and follow our Dalai Lama, speak our language, celebrate our culture, educate our children, govern ourselves, and live our lives as we desire, could not be more universal. To do so free from fear, coercion, and violence could not be more universal. To embrace freedom could not be more universal. When the Chinese government denies that our rights are universal,

it is only to justify their cruelty and repression. National security has long been an impediment to universal human rights. Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, in 2001, it was the pretext for extraordinary rendition and black hole detention sites where countless individuals were tortured and disappeared. It was the rationale for sending prisoners to the lawlessness of Guantanamo Bay. It is the excuse for indefinite imprisonment in northeast Syria today. It is the cover for Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza. There are few rights so emphatically declared to be unconditional as the prohibition on torture. But suddenly, post 9-11, torture was up for

debate. There were new membership criteria, and they were no longer part of the Human Rights Club. They was Osama bin Laden, but also anyone who knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding and someone went to the same mosque as the person who knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding, someone who was Muslim had been to Afghanistan and had a beard and so on. Once we start stripping away rights, we don't know where to stop. We are told it is one or the other. More human rights protection means greater insecurity. Beefing up security necessitates restricting rights. Some of us are on the rights protected side of that line. Others are not. Abdullah al-Malkeh, a Canadian citizen, experienced that firsthand.

In the volatile days after September the 11th, Abdullah was unlawfully imprisoned in Syria for close to two years. He was repeatedly tortured and held in inhumane conditions. The Canadian government was complicit in what was happening to him, even sending questions that his torturers used during interrogation sessions. After he was freed, a judicial inquiry cleared his name and documented the Canadian government's role, leading to an eventual settlement and apology. Twenty years later, Abdullah regularly speaks in the International Human Rights Law courses I teach.

He is eloquent about the relationship between security and human rights. He tells students, the more we continue to torture, disappear, and lock people up indefinitely without trial, all in the name of security, the more lives we shatter, the more pain we inflict, and the more dangerous and insecure our world becomes. Money makes the world go around. For the longest time, that business world

was seen as outside the domain of human rights. Companies were, after all, not states. so international obligations did not apply. And so trade deals were struck, and companies became transnational beaumoths, and none of it was about human rights. Once again, the clear message was that you have universal human rights until you don't.

You have rights until a mine, oil field, or forest full of timber is more valuable than your rights. Then you are out of the club. But communities that have borne the contaminated tailings of foreign mining companies and workers in unsafe manufacturing plants have pushed back. There is growing recognition that these are serious human rights concerns. At the UN Human Rights Council, states have even adopted a set of guiding principles on business in human rights. Responding to years of campaigning pressure, the Canadian government established the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise in 2018,

mandated to look into allegations of human rights abuse against Canadian extractive and garment companies. But the government broke its promise to grant the Ombudsperson's subpoena and other powers needed to conduct effective investigations. In 2012, I addressed a National Congress of thousands of indigenous leaders and activists from across Columbia. A few years earlier, Colombia's constitutional court had ruled that

indigenous peoples in the country faced the risk of genocide. At the Congress, I had a long conversation with a YU elder. He spoke of the ravages of Colombia's long civil war. Then he told me that the YU now faced the gravest threat of all. The monster is coming and will take everything from us. I asked who the monster was. He told me it was the mining companies, many from Canada, that were destroying their lands and their lives. And he worried that no one knows how to stop this monster and most people don't even care.

Indifference is one of the great enemies of universal human rights. It allows us to shrug even. when the most essential human rights promise of all is broken. The eloquent Rohingya human rights defender and poet, Mayu Ali and I have spoken often of genocides, never-ending toll. Once he left me without words when he asked, how is it that the billions of tears of the millions of lives ripped from us by seemingly endless genocide have not been,

enough to bathe our world in goodness and compassion for the rest of time. Genocide tears the heart out of universality. In its cruel madness, any notion of people having inherent and inalienable rights is denied from birth when they are deemed less than human through to death when their rights are irrevocably destroyed. We actively avoid the discomfort of recognizing the treatment of indigenous peoples in Canada as genocide when we need to face that history and have vital national conversations about redressing genocide's legacy and continuing harms. Aggressive attempts to silence demands to end genocide in Gaza are one indication among many that Palestinians are excluded from the Human Rights Club. Michael Link, who once served as the UN's

special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, puts it plainly. The humanity of Palestinians has been denied at every turn. Human rights have been proclaimed as universal, but the Palestinian people have been orphaned. Indifference to genocide cannot be an option. You're listening to the third of the 2025 CBC Massey lectures. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. 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 Specsavers 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.caps.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.C.A. to learn more. Are your pipes ready for a deep freeze? You can take action to help protect your home from extreme weather. Discover prevention tips that can help you be climate ready at keep it intact.ca. Universal human rights are supposed to be just that, universal.

But according to Alex Neve, the rich and powerful keep moving the goalposts to decide who has rights and who doesn't. From the Meyer Horowitz Theater in Edmonton, here again is Alex Neve with Inherent and Inalienable. Human rights are not earned. So where do we turn? We expect laws to uphold our rights. Laws should be the ultimate guarantor of the inherent and inalienable standing of our rights. Yet laws are often the very instrument of repression and exclusion. laws define who is in and who is out of the human rights club.

In June 2013, I spent several days interviewing prisoners in the civil prison in Noakshot, Mauritania. We were there to look into the cases of a number of men who had been arrested on national security charges and had been tortured in detention. One afternoon, as I was moving from one section of the prison to another, a young man quietly asked, if we could talk. He had been arrested on accusations of stealing a motorcycle, which he categorically denied,

but he had a much more serious fear. Hassan was 18 years old, gay, and terrified that his secret would be discovered. Same-sex relations are criminalized in Mauritania with a maximum possible penalty of death by stoning. As we drank tea to get

in a corner of the prison, he asked rhetorically whether people understand what it feels like to know you cannot turn to the law to uphold your rights because it is the law itself that says you have no rights. What do I do when the law says that I am not allowed to exist and threatens to kill me because of who I am? On a return visit to the prison a few days later, I learned that Hassan had been released. I have often wondered how he navigated life in a society that denies his existence. Perhaps he has found refuge in another country, one that does not strip him of his rights. Law, of course, is what formalized and defined apartheid in South Africa, and it provides the insidious legal frameworks for Israel's apartheid against Palestinians and Myanmar's against the

A staggering range of laws blatantly deny women their rights around the world. In Afghanistan and Iran, the stripping away of equal rights for women through a parade of laws and edicts has created a world of gender apartheid. Closer to home, for decades, Canada's Indian Act enshrined racism and sexism in law at the same time. Successive federal governments refused to address the act's explicit sexism by which women with Indian status, who married non-status men, lost their status, while men with status could marry non-status women without consequence. Rights literally there one day and stripped away the next. That injustice only started to be addressed after a series of rulings from UN human rights bodies. Totalitarian and authoritarian governments everywhere use law to crush freedom, control people's lives, and strip them of their rights.

Through a barrage of executive orders, Donald Trump has launched a purge of so-called wokeism across the entirety of the U.S. government, military, and educational institutions. wokeism, having become an inflammatory pejorative, denigrating efforts to tackle racism, sexism, and discrimination. Millions of people, written out of the universal human rights promise with the stroke of a sharpie. That is the law. The law is meant to protect refugees, but increasingly it is used to deny them protection. Lujin Ahmed Nassif was a four-year-old Syrian refugee who, along with her mother, one-year-old sister, and 60 other refugees set off from Lebanon in a wooden fishing boat in late August 2022, trying to reach Italy. But they ran out of provisions, and their boat started leaking. They sent distress signals, but rescue did not come for several days. By that time,

Lujin was unconscious, and she soon died. Her last words were said to be, Mother, I'm thirsty. Today, on every continent, millions of refugees and migrants are treated as if they need to prove their worthiness to have water when thirsty, their worthiness to access rights.

But Luzin did not need to prove she had the right to live. The universal human rights promise included her, her mother and sister and everyone on that boat. At the end of 2024, 123 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide, up from 51 million, more than double, a decade earlier. As the conditions they face worsen, growing numbers of refugees seek safety elsewhere. But states enact laws and send out the Coast Guard, border patrols,

drones to intercept refugees before they arrive. The message is, you are not from here, so you are not in the Human Rights Club. Canada joined the border closing club years ago with the 2004 safe third country agreements with the United States. That border remains closed, even while the Trump administration ruthlessly assaults the right. of refugees and migrants. That is the law. Some of the most pernicious examples of law being used to withhold the human rights promise involve people living in poverty and people who are homeless. I recall an afternoon spent meeting with people living in an encampment in Vancouver Park. I spoke with Jenna, a young indigenous woman who had been living on the streets, in shelters,

and now this encampment, off and on for several years. She asked, knowing the answer, do people truly think this is what I want from life? Do they really believe my rights matter less than theirs? Behind Jenna's experience lies the wretched reality of economic injustice in our world, a wholesale denial of universal human rights to billions of people. Oxfam shows us the obscene disparity between extreme poverty and extreme wealth globally. Since 2020, for every $1 of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90% of humanity,

one of the world's billionaires has gained $1.7 million. In Canada, there are an estimated 35,000 homeless individuals across. the country at any given time, around 25% of whom live in encampments. Do their rights matter? A growing number of mayors and premiers think not. They are considering using the infamous notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights to literally strip people of their rights. Without a home, apparently, you don't deserve rights. To have rights, you need money. The Human Rights Club, it turns out, is expensive. What if when the law orders a person to be killed?

By its very essence, the right to life is the epitome of a right that is inherent and inalienable. But states did not fully commit to that right when first elaborating the promise. There was an explicit exception for the death penalty. It reflected a world in the mid-19. in which the overwhelming majority of states regularly executed people. That has changed dramatically. Amnesty International reports that by 2024, 145 countries around the world have abolished the death penalty either in law or practice.

Years ago, at an Amnesty International event in Toronto, I had the incredible honor to speak alongside Sister Helen Prejean, whose resolute campaigning against the death penalty was made famous in the award-winning movie Dead Man Walking. Late into the night, we talked about whether we would ever reach universal abolition. She was certain that we would, noting that being against the death penalty means being for life. And as long as it takes, life will ultimately have the last word. Indeed, a right that can never be canceled or forfeited. The promise of inherent and in inelitable rights that took shape with the Universal Declaration in 1948 is meant to reach across the fault lines of geopolitics, security, money, and indifference, and is meant to supersede national laws that deny and strip away rights.

Over the decades, the Declaration's soaring aspiration and promise has been reinforced through a web of binding legal obligations, enshrined in countless treaties, constitutions, and laws. First up, two UN covenants were adopted, dealing separately with civil and political rights, such as fair trials and freedom of expression, and economic social and cultural rights, such as health care and education. They may be divided into different treaties, and countries in the global north, including Canada, may seek to downplay economic, social, and cultural rights as matters for budgets, not courts, but that reticence is giving way in the face of grassroots advocacy. Crucial rights to housing, food, water, and inadequate livelihood are increasingly understood to be just that. inherent and inalienable rights. The historic 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, for instance,

affirmed that all rights are universal, interrelated, interdependent, and indivisible. The treaties have kept coming, dealing with crucial human rights concerns such as racial discrimination, discrimination against women, torture, children, migrant workers, persons with disabilities, and forced disappearances, the death penalty, children in armed conflict, child sexual exploitation, and preventing torture. Canada supports most, but not all, of these treaties. The possibility of Canada becoming a party to the optional protocol to the Convention Against Torture, focused on preventing torture, has been under consideration

for at least 20 years, but never progresses. The Market Workers Convention has never even made it to the under-consideration list. The government has said it is looking into the Convention on Enforced Disappearances, but nothing happens, perhaps because politicians do not believe enforced disappearances happen here? Well, Kimberly Murray,

the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools begs to differ. She concludes that children who were locked up and went missing from state-sanctioned or state-run residential schools may well have been victims of enforced disappearance.

So it is worth pausing here and reflecting on Canada's membership criteria for the Human Rights Club. Do migrant workers have to, to become citizens to earn their rights? Do prisoners at risk of torture, not count? Have the rights of disappeared indigenous children? Similarly, disappeared?

Beyond treaties, there is a mountain of declarations, principles, and rules reinforcing the universal promise when human rights harms are caused by companies, protecting human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, and prisoners, preventing violence. preventing violence against women, and recognizing human rights to safe water and sanitation and to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. And always, the human rights promise is universal, no matter where we were born, who we are,

or what we do. States have, with wild abandon, continued to make these human rights promises, but are they held to what they have promised? Or do they simply cross their fingers behind their backs while basking in the photo-op of signing a treaty? Enforcement, to put it mildly, remains elusive. So where does this leave us? Over these past 80 years, the advance of the universal human rights promise has been unstoppable, even when the promise has been breached at every turn.

The impetus has come from people. A collective call from humanity to turn the universal human rights promise into reality, an insistence that human rights do not belong just to members of the club, but to all of us. Sir Nigel Rodley was instrumental on behalf of Amnesty International in the drive to finalize the Convention Against Torture back in the 1980s, and he once described that process to me beautifully as voices flowing out of the world's torture chambers and into the corridors of global power. Voices flowing into corridors of power.

In northeast Syria, our delegation worked closely with Khabat Abbas, a Syrian Kurdish journalist and human rights advocate whose courage and conviction knows no bounds. One evening, sitting on the roof of our hotel in Kamishli, waiting with tense anticipation for her phone to ring with confirmation of a prison visit. We spoke about the influential role of women in the local administration and military forces.

She told me this was because women believed in their rights. As she put it, they may try to keep us out, keep us down, and keep us afraid, but here in Syria and everywhere, women have pushed back and shown that we won't be silenced, we won't go away and we won't accept anything less than our full rights. Here in Canada, Sheila Day, a passionate women's human rights advocate who has been in the trenches nationally and globally for decades, starkly reminds us that we continue to live

in a world in which the rights of women and girls are violated every day, often in the most violent and cruel ways imaginable. To the extent that today's world is more equal for many women and girls, she tells me that has come from the courageous, irrepressible activism of women and girls insisting that they have rights, and those rights must be recognized. Tireless Disability Rights Champion, the late Steve Esty, once described to me how much the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006 meant. People with disabilities have forced open a door that had long been closed and locked, but there would be no going back. The world can no longer pretend as it has since time immemorial that people with disabilities are less than human and therefore have no rights.

Indefatigable, 2SLGBQI Plus advocate, Debbie Awuso-Aqa, talks of enormous strides from being completely left out of the global human rights conversation and denied our basic humanity to now being very much at the table. She notes that while that progress has provoked a hateful and often violent backlash, our rights, our equal rights, have been recognized as such, and we are not going anywhere. Won't go away. Irrepressible. No going back. Not going anywhere. There is still far to go, but the universal human rights promise has ignited unstoppable movements that have pushed back at the denial and stripping away of rights and have brought unquenchable hope,

but also tremendous gains to local and global struggles for life, freedom, equality, and justice for all. Which brings me to impunity, the flip side to the failure of universality. Just as some people who are kept out of the Human Rights Club, because of who they are, there are others who, perhaps due to wealth, military might, control of energy reserves, or geopolitical clout, are ensconced in a club that ensures they avoid accountability because of who they are. For the universal promise to hold, we need human rights for all and impunity for none. Back in 1991, I was completing a master's degree in international human rights law in the United Kingdom and interning with the British Refugee Council.

When Augusto Pinochet, head of the Chilean military and the former president who had violently overthrown Chile's democratically elected government in 1973, came to the UK on an arms-buying trip. Among the myriad human rights violations the Pinochet regime was notorious for, torture was high on the list. Coincidentally, I had been studying the UN Convention Against Torture, which had entered into force only four years earlier. We had spent much time in class discussing the fact that the Convention adopted what is known as universal jurisdiction over the crime of torture, Meaning that if someone who was accused of torture was present in the territory of any state party, such as the United Kingdom, they must be brought to justice, either through a local trial or extradition to another country. And universal jurisdiction applied even if the torture had not occurred there, and neither the accused torturer nor their victims were nationals of that country. for torturers, there would be nowhere to hide.

The universal promise had expanded impunity for none. I shared this information with colleagues at the Refugee Council, including a woman who had come to Britain as a refugee from Chile when she was a child. My naive certainty that universal jurisdiction over torture could be enforced against Augusto Pinochet, even while Margaret Thatcher was rolling out the red carpet was infectious enough that she recruited two volunteer lawyers to the cause. We worked feverishly to draft a brief calling for Pinochet's arrest under universal jurisdiction, which we couriered to several UK government officials.

We had no response. Pinochet came and went undisturbed. Fast forward, seven years to 1998. I was back in the United Kingdom for meetings, as was Pinochet in a London hospital for medical treatment. One morning, waiting for a bus, I opened my paper to headlines about Pinochet's arrest at the hospital on an international warrant on torture charges laid against him by a Spanish judge. This time, justice seemed ready to roll. Around that same time, I was working closely with a remarkable Ghanaian human rights advocate, the late Samuel Zan Akologo, who served on the International Executive Committee of Amnesty International. Samuel worked with humanitarian organizations and traveled extensively through small villages across northern Ghana.

It was before the days of social media and accessible internet and the most important sources of news in those villages were community radio and, when available, the BBC World Service on shortwave. I met up with Samuel in London in late 1998 a few weeks after Pinochet's historic arrest, and he shared captivating accounts from those villages where he had been only a week or two earlier. people were glued to the radio,

keenly following what was happening in the United Kingdom. Why the rapt attention, I asked. After all, Pinochet's crimes had taken place in Chile, a country with which Ghanaians had very few ties, and were being investigated by a judge in Spain and considered by courts in the United Kingdom. But as Samuel pointed out, what was happening resonated globally,

the message was that even the most powerful will be held to account. Samuel told us of an elderly man in one of the villages who had assured his grandchildren that justice would spread around the world and find its way to their village. One of his granddaughters had already made a school presentation about the Pinochet case. In another village, a number of women who had been abused by local police officers told Samuel that the news had given them the confidence to lay a complaint against their attackers. I've often wondered about that granddaughter. Perhaps she went on to become a human rights lawyer.

And did those women succeed with their complaint? If not, perhaps they inspired someone else to follow their lead. What I do know is that Ghana was among the first countries in the world, the sixth, to ratify the Rome statute establishing the international criminal corps. court, doing so on December the 20th, 1999. In fact, Ghana signed on before Canada did. After Pinochet's arrest, a lengthy legal battle followed in the United Kingdom, including three rulings from the House of Lords. The final judgment held that charges involving incidents after the UK's ratification of the Convention Against Torture, at which point universal

jurisdiction applied could be enforced by the United Kingdom, the very arguments we had made in 1991. Augusto Pinochet was controversially allowed to return to Chile in 2000 on questionable medical grounds. Over the next six years, he faced ongoing investigations and charges within the Chilean justice system. He died on December the 10th, 2000. Ironically, and perhaps defiantly, on International Human Rights Day, marking the 58th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Never having been convicted, but now largely remembered to history as a human rights criminal. This dramatic turn of events for Pinochet was by no means in isolation. For decades, survivors, of human rights violations, the family members of victims, lawyers, and human rights groups

had been demanding that impunity give way to justice. There had been a flicker of hope after the Second World War when the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals held trials, but that was short-lived. Since then, impunity had been the order of the day, no matter how horrendous the human rights crimes. Shifting global politics after the Cold War opened up new possibilities. In 1993, the Security Council established a groundbreaking special court, the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, with a mandate to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed during the wars that took place during the breakup of Yugoslavia. Then in 1994, the Security Council set up the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

with a similar mandate. Those developments reinvigorated the dream of a permanent international court to bring the world's worst human rights violators to justice. This culminated in a diplomatic conference in 1998, at the end of which states adopted the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court. While Pinochet's case was not destined for that court, it was part of the same breakthrough. Human rights violators were no longer guaranteed, undisturbed membership in the impunity club.

Now, the International Criminal Court faces many challenges. It is no small matter taking on powerful, political, and military leaders responsible for egregious human rights violations. But the court is leading the charge globally in pursuing justice for mass atrocities, including the recent arrest of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and having issued, still outstanding, arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Omar al-Bashir, and Taliban leader, Habatullah Akunzada. Justice is indeed beginning to roll, a world of impunity for not.

none is still far in the distance, but it is no longer impossible to believe that we might get there. Let us return to northeast Syria. One of the men our delegation asked to see was Jack Letts, whose mother, Sally Lane, lived a few blocks from me in Ottawa. Jack had been in prison for over six years, and it had been so long since the last news of him that his family anguished about whether he was still alive. Jack had been a dual United Kingdom Canadian national until his UK nationality was revoked while he was locked up in Syria. His rights literally stripped away. He remained a Canadian citizen, but Canada had no interest in bringing him home. He was deemed unworthy of assistance, but he wasn't charged with any crime and there was no legal process, not in Syria, the United Kingdom or Canada, open to him to defend himself.

For days, Syrian Kurdish authorities gave us no straight answer. First, we were told we could not see any of the men. Then we were told they were looking into it. Next, they told us they could not find Jack. It was in the final hours of our last night that we received permission and rushed to the prison where he was being held. I had come with letters, books, photos, and video messages from his family that the prison director let me play for Jack. He was allowed to write a short note back to them. Jack teared up several times, as did most of us who were in the room, including the prison officials. For a moment, it felt like universal human rights had found their way to that prison. At the end of our visit, Jack asked whether I thought he would still be there in another 10 years. How to respond. I did not want to crush his hope or raise false hope.

I told him there was no immediate prospect of his release, but that I was hopeful that he might, be free within one year. Two years and two months after our visit, he remains imprisoned. By birth and from birth, Jack was able to turn to two governments to keep the human rights promise. The United Kingdom firmly turned its back and took the promise away from him, and Canada simply ignores the promise. But Jack's rights have not been extinct. I checked in with Sally not long ago, and she described the anguished limbo in which she remains trapped. When we say that everyone has rights, but then we arbitrarily deny some people the ability to pursue justice when their rights are violated, then do any of us truly have any rights in the end?

Sally's rhetorical question Do any of us truly have rights in the end captures the essential human rights challenges we all face the answer should be and is of course we do but until we deliver that promise for everyone the true answer remains maybe yes

maybe no that is not good enough not for jack and not for any of us we are all born with rights none of us lose our rights we must hold each other and hold ourselves to that promise all human beings are after all born free and equal in dignity and rights thank you very much Human rights lawyer Alex Need, with his lecture, inherent and inalienable, human rights are not earned. It's the third of his 2025 CBC Massey lectures. In his fourth lecture, Alex explores what it means to believe in or doubt human rights

and brings us to where change always begins, small places close to home. Thank you so much, Alex. I think we're all coming away, richer after this evening. And thank you to CBC Edmonton's Tara McCarthy for hosting this third installment of the Massey Lectures. Thanks also to the staff at the Meyer Horowitz Theater who hosted this event. You can get the entire 2025 CBCMassie Lectures series at cbc.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.

Our partners are House of Anancy Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. 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 slash podcasts.