Ideas - Meet Alex Neve, the 2025 CBC Massey Lecturer

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Ahead of the Massey tour, Alex Neve sits down with Nahlah Ayed to talk about his lectures, Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World. This year, the lectures are coming to: Toronto, Sept. 19Vancouver, Sept. 25Edmonton, Oct. 1Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Oct. 15Ottawa, Oct. 30Tickets are available now for the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures — and selling fast! For information on how to get tickets, go to cbc.ca/masseys. 

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. And I'm here to introduce you to our 2025 Massey lecturer, Alex Neve. Alex is a longtime human rights lawyer and advocate. And for 20 years, he was the Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada. And in that capacity, he traveled the world, bearing witness to its misfortunes. His lectures are titled Universal, Revenue. renewing human rights in a fractured world.

Welcome to you, Alex, and a huge congratulations. Well, thank you very much for the congratulations. And it's such a delight. I'm really looking forward to having this conversation with you, Nala. Me too. But before I do that, I want to know what it's like for you to join the ranks of Massey lectures, so many big names in Canadian history, who have addressed our audiences both here in Canada and abroad,

for more than half a century. So probably my first mistake was to actually look at that list and realize amongst other things that I was on a list that included Martin Luther King. That was the first one that jumped out at me. But obviously incredible thinkers and artistic Canadians, creative Canadians, you know, leading edge political thinkers in the country. and I'm just, it wouldn't be adequate to say humbled and honored, although I certainly am both of those things. But I guess maybe more significantly, you realize that there's both a tremendous gift, but a very real responsibility that comes with having this opportunity, this platform.

And particularly, and I know we'll probably get into this, given what I'm exploring at this particular moment in history, the serious of nuts. of that is certainly not lost on me. That's a wonderful place, maybe a terrible place, but an apt place to start, which is this moment. You know, we live at a moment that many have described as the collapse of the post-war international order. One in every 67 people worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their homes.

Death tolls continue to climb in Gaza and Sudan and Ukraine and many places beyond because of armed conflict. This is a big question, but at the heart of it, what is it that you want to say to the world about human rights through your Massey lectures at this particular troubling moment in history? I think it begins by acknowledging just how heavy and troubling and broken and fearful these times are. I think all of us, I'm sure pretty well everyone who listens to the lectures will agree that, We find ourselves just endlessly having conversations with friends and neighbors and colleagues and someone we bump into on the street that is reflective of that. We begin by quite legitimately asking each other, how are you doing? Not in that usual kind of passing way that we tend to.

We realize that these are times in which we are all distressed and lost. I hope to be able to make it clear that when it comes to, you know, the enormity of the climate catastrophe, to the terrifying scale of mass atrocities, to the unstoppable rise of hate and disinformation in our world, and many other things that I'll explore, that all of them are at their very core in very fundamental ways about human rights. So hopefully that gives a sense of there is a way forward. There is a roadmap here. But to acknowledge that human rights, the human rights regime, the international human rights order has been with us for decades, so what gives? Why do we find ourselves in 2025 in such a broken and lost place?

If we've had this incredible magnificent human rights regime available to us for so long, And it's, I think, really important to bring home to each other, not just to bring home to governments and power elites, but to each other, that the reason that we find ourselves in this state is because we've never truly embraced what that human rights vision is all about. Your first lecture opens with the image of a lifeboat. What does that image mean to you in this context? It's an image that was shared with me in a very powerful encounter I had with the Rohingya refugee man in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, who used that terminology.

He had an incredibly powerful metaphor of all of the things that had happened and were still happening to the Rohingya, and he kept using the verb drowning. We are drowning, drowning literally, drowning figuratively. And then I noticed that quite remarkably, he had a tattered, slightly torn copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, posted on a support post in his shelter. And I didn't push the conversation in this way. He naturally started talking about the Universal Declaration. And after having talked so much about this sense of drowning, talked about the Universal Declaration as a lifeboat. That's five or six years ago that I had that encounter, and I've never been able to shake it since. I mean, the fact that the Universal Declaration was there in the first place.

Extraordinary. But then that it had this hopeful, positive sense for a man and his family who had every reason to have totally given up on anything that something like the Universal Declaration might promise. And as that has sat with me in the years since and then thinking about it as I was writing the book, obviously there's that very immediate sense of the lifeboat as something that can save us. And certainly I'm sure there's an aspect of that in why he used that phrase. But then as you sit with it, there's other parts that become very appealing. I think one of the things that I find so very powerful of the lifeboat imagery is is that yes, I mean, I guess we could individually as a solitary person get into that lifeboat,

but we generally think of the lifeboat as something that is collective, that is there for a group of us. And I think at this point in time, where there is such a sense of danger and threat and challenge, anything that gives us the opportunity to come together to find, you know, whether it's routes to safety or finding some new safe harbor, I think is exactly what we want to be focusing on. Now, that's the promise of the lifeboat. And you spend a considerable time in these lectures, or you will be spending considerable time in these lectures talking about how that lifeboat has actually not been seaworthy for everyone,

that it has left, you know, legion of people behind, legions of people behind. Again, this is a large question, but why is it that this lifeboat has so often failed to reach the people who need it? What's at the heart of that? So the overall title of the book and, of course, the lecture series is universal. Universal renewing the promise of human rights in a fractured world. And I think that's the word that answers your question.

And I've really settled on that as the title and an overarching theme of all of this for two reasons. Number one, of course, the universal Declaration of Human Rights, that's a powerful word of promise and potential. It conveys such an incredible message to us that this is about all of us. But the flip side, and this is the answer to your particular question, Nala, is it also tells us how we have failed, where we have betrayed the promise. because I think in some respects, yes, we can dig into all the ways we've fallen short on human rights. You know, we didn't do this right. We didn't adopt this law when we should have. You know, the Security Council didn't make this decision about human rights. But stepping back, for me, the bigger failure is that first word of that incredible instrument, universal.

That's where we have completely fallen apart, where we have absolutely fallen apart, where we have absolutely allowed deliberately, inadvertently, but I think more deliberately than anything, to live in a world where far from human rights being something that is universally promised and thus universally delivered, we've created a human rights club in our world. And it's not just a handful of people who we deny membership in the club too. it's been billions and that's what we have to grapple with the promise was meant to be universal

unless and until we truly grasp that and could there be a more important moment in our history of humanity to do that then it will always fall short ultimately in these lectures you write about this human rights order

that emerged after the Second World War as effectively a series of promises that we had made to each other, all of us, the global citizenry. Can we just kind of engage in an imagining exercise? Who will we become if we continue to break those promises? The word promise is a very interesting one to sit with. And I do have a couple of pages in the book where I did sit with it, because I realized that I wanted to sort of unpack what is promise all about. And when you do sit with it, you recognize that it is this word that at the same time holds maybe kind of hopeful aspiration to it, but also clear contractual binding obligation. And I think there's something about the human rights promise that we combine

both of those. We do think of human rights promise as dreamy, hopeful aspiration for that better world that is maybe 5, 10, 50 years down the road. But we at the same time have this understandable, as we should, very clear expectation that concrete specific promises beginning in the Universal Declaration, but in countless treaties, binding treaties, since. But it's this second sense of what a promise is all about that we have been colossally deficient.

And I think we're at a tipping point now, especially at a time when that side of the promise has perhaps meant more than it ever has. You know, the devastating breach of the promise to prevent genocide, for instance, that if we don't turn that around, how can we blame not just millions or hundreds of millions, but billions of people of completely relegating the universal human rights promise to the trash heaps of history out of a sense of whether it's anger, disappointment, cynicism, or just completely being fed up with the double speak and hypocrisy that lies behind those broken promises. It feels at times that we're very close to that. Oh, I think we are absolutely. And I'm sure that will come up in the Q&A session after some of the Massey lectures. I mean, certainly public talks I've given where there is a lively Q&A session afterwards, there's inevitably any number of people who ask questions, which are a variation

of convince me why I should believe. And that's what it's all about right now, right? And it's not an easy answer, especially when it comes from communities that have been completely abandoned. I had some incredibly powerful encounters with Palestinian-Canadian students at the University of Ottawa student encampment last year after an international law teach-in that I and an amazing law professor, Professor Arty Imsaiz and I were doing with the students. And those were the questions that came up afterwards. And how could they not for a Palestinian-Canadian to say, really? International law is here for me? Is here for my community, for my family, for my people?

sure isn't how I see these last 40, 50, 60 years. And can you show me and convince me why I should think that the years to come are going to be any different? And your response? I did my best. We did our best. It's, you know, you talk about gradual progress. You talk about doing more and doing better. You talk about solidarity. Certainly with respect to the situation in Gaza, we did talk about the fact that while we are seeing something, which I think most of us no longer have words to capture, the scale of an atrociousness of the horrors happening on the ground, at the same time, the confidence and faith with which many people are turning to international law, you know, cases being launched at the International Court of Justice, everyone watching closely what the International Criminal Court is doing, with maybe. Maybe, yes, on one hand, a bit of sense of naive hope and expectation that maybe it'll be a bit different. But I also see a shift there of some certainty and some clarity and some conviction that we must make international law deliver the goods this time. And so that's on display at the same time.

And I think that's what we hold on to. And that's what takes us forward. So finally, in an attempt to begin to answer the question of why should we be convinced or begin to convince me that human rights law actually matters, there is one person that really stuck with me from your lectures, and we don't want to give them all away, but I'd love to hear about someone you talk about in your fourth lecture, and his name is Harun Yakup. What did you learn from that case about what it means to believe in human rights? So that happened during the midst of an Amnesty International research trip in eastern Chad around 20 years ago

at a time when the horrific violence that had been devastating Darfur in Sudan had spilled across the border into Chad and was replicating. Villages were being attacked and destroyed. And we were there very early on when that was happening. In many respects, I think we were often only about a week or so behind the Janjaweed groups that were destroying and attacking villages. And we came upon the people of a village called Jorlo, which had been attacked and destroyed and people killed. And the people of Jorlo had fled. And we both first encountered their destroyed in abandoned village.

And then a few days later encountered them in a very makeshift refugee site that they had been able to construct in a grove of trees. and spent quite a bit of time with them. And they were, even though obviously they had enormous, enormous needs and challenges at the time, they were very generous in sharing their account and information about what they'd been through. And that included at a certain point,

we wanted to record the names of everyone who had been killed. And they were very, very clear that 40 people had been killed. And I had my notebook out and very quickly my pages filled. you know, in human rights work, we have many such very sorrowful notebooks of names and whenever possible, gender, date of birth, maybe a little information about other family members. And we got to 39 names, and we stopped. And I asked, is that it? But no, everyone was absolutely certain it had been 40, but the 40th name wasn't forthcoming.

And there was much consternation, even, which I started to feel better. about and certainly starts to reassure people, it's all right. We can say 40 people killed. Here's 39 of the names. The last name unknown at this time, which of course was nothing anyone wanted to record for history. And for an hour or so, there were conversations. People were coming back to me and looking at my list again. And then it happened. And it wasn't just that somebody suddenly yelled out his name. I was told we needed to reassemble. We were sitting under the one very large tree that offered some shade. And there was this incredible moment, Nala. And it was if his name was being gifted to me, Harun Yacoub. And I've never been able to leave his name behind,

because it for me is the most profoundly important reminder that universal human rights is about every single one of us individually, that every one of us matters, and that it's not our death or suffering that matters most. It's, of course, that we lived and thrived and loved and were beloved by the people of Jorlo that matters. I wrote his name later on a slip of paper that I now have in my daily agenda every year. There's a new daily agenda, and every year I slip. it into the back cover of that agenda as something that I carry with me as a reminder of just that, that we all matter and that at the end of the day, the universal promise of human rights is one person at a time.

It's an extraordinary story. Thank you for telling us about that. I look forward to hearing the rest of it in the lectures. Thank you, Alex Neve, so much, for just one of the conversations we're going to have about these lectures. Thanks so much, Nala. I've enjoyed it very, very much. You've been listening to my conversation with Alex Neve, the 2025 Massey Lecturer, speaking to me from Montreal. The Massey Lecture Tour with Alex begins September 19th in Toronto, and from there we'll go to Vancouver, Edmonton, Happy Valley, Goose Bay, and Ottawa.

Tickets are on sale now. For more information, go to cbc.ca.ca.massies. That's cbc.ca.ca. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.