Ideas - The spark that ignited a 40-year fight for human rights

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

When he was eight, 2025 CBC Massey Lecturer Alex Neve watched his mother fight for daycare in Alberta. It’s shaped how he thinks about human rights activism. Neve shares the pivotal moments in his life that led to his human rights advocacy — and shines a light on the chorus of people he carries with him. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 14, 2025.

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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.caver to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. A lot of it is things that I have brought.

back from some of the most meaningful field work I've done in all corners of the world. Over there on that shelf, I have a very proud Fidel Castro bobblehead doll from the Radio Gitmo gift shop in Guantanamo Bay. No way. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm standing in the colorful home office of Alex Neef, our 2025 CBC Massey lecturer. every surface in the room is covered with treasures, each reflecting a different moment in a whole life dedicated to human rights.

Well, here I'll take you to this over here. So this is a beautiful ceramic piece, as you can see, it's by a Peruvian artist, and it's playing the pan flute, right? And you'll see it says, for Alex Neve from Hugo Bazan, who was one of the very first clon, I had in the days when I worked as a refugee lawyer. And what it says is, I'm like the wind that comes and goes.

And solo pido a my mother's tier, I only ask of my motherland, that at final me jae to die in ella, that I be brought back to die in her. And it's a powerful statement of what it is to be a refugee. There's a broken water pot from a village and tad that was devastated by a militia attack,

a triumphant photo of a young girl hoisted above the crowds at Egypt's Tahrir Square, gifted to Alex at a solidarity rally in Ottawa. And there's countless photos of the people Alex met in the two decades he traveled the world as Secretary General of MC International Canada. I guess I'm the kind of person who, wants and needs to be surrounded by those reminders, those ground me in remembering what is real and what is important.

And so they fill me up, for instance, when I sit down to pound away and write five chapters for a Massey Lectures book. The stories of the people he's met on the front lines of human rights struggles now form the beating heart of his lectures, which are called universal, renewing human rights, in a fractured world. The lectures took him to new corners of our very large country, and the stories of the people he met along the way are now in this room, too. Oh, actually, Ed!

Ed! Yes, oh, Ed! You saw Ed. You didn't know he had a name yet. Oh, is that? And one of my latest editions has came from the tour in Happy Valley, Goose Bay. And this is Ed, a beautiful bird, made out of sealskin, with a bit of leather that was gifted me by an Inuit woman who we had an incredible meeting with.

And just before I was heading up to begin giving my lecture in Happy Valley Goose Bay, she said, I've got someone to keep you company. And he has now come home. At first he didn't have a name, but she later decided that he should probably be named Ed, because her last name is Edmonds. So this is for Sharon Edmonds. and is going to have pride of place on my desk for quite some time. Another person that you carry it with you.

Yeah, absolutely. You can hear Alex's lectures on ideas. Ahead of the broadcast, I sat down with him to talk about the chorus of people, both the living and the long gone, who have shaped the way he thinks about human rights and the country we call home. In your lectures, you quote a line from Eleanor Ruzzi. Roosevelt about how universal human rights start or begin in small places close to home. And right now we're meeting in this room, in your home.

It's a small space that we're sitting in right now. Can you tell me about it and what it means to you? Well, I guess home, maybe before I focus on the room itself, home, of course, is about family. It's about love. It's about my dear partner in life, Pat. It's about our three children who we raised in this home. And so there's something very grounding and true about what this place is. It was the place that I came back to no matter what I was being exposed to in human rights work.

It's been a place of honesty and support and growth, growth for me, growth for our family. This room is my place. Now, that's not entirely true. If you notice the color scheme in this room, Apple Red and Apple Green, this is my daughter in grade 7. So I've inherited her room. And you've kept the colors. Well, I've just not gotten around to changing the colors. But, you know, a few people tell me it works.

That back wall you see over there, the red wall with a whole series of photographs on it. And those are photographs from a lot of the fieldwork I've done over the years. They're all very special. some of them hold very poignant memories. A lot of people tell me that that's one of the best Zoom backdrops they've ever seen. So maybe I shouldn't mess with perfection. It feels like a sanctuary from the not-so-pretty things that happen outside this place. Yeah, sanctuary is probably a nice way to frame it.

I mean, here we are. It's up at the third floor of our house. It's very quiet up here. And I think we all need that to a certain degree, a place where we can be alone with our thoughts. in whatever way that needs to move forward, whether it's going to come out in writing or other ways. In a troubled world, we need sanctuary. So this has been your home where you've raised your family, but you grew up in Calgary. And I wonder if you could take us back to the home that you had there.

And what you learned about human rights in that home as you were growing up. So, yes, I was born in Calgary. My father was a Calgarian. My mother was from New Brunswick, but they met. married there. And sadly, my father died at a young age. He died. He was only 38. I was eight at the time. I have a lot of memories of him being a warm and special man, obviously. He was a lawyer. He was a lawyer famous for his inability to bill his clients. So I'm kind of taking from that, that there was something in him that was focused on what really matters is that people get the

representation or the support or the services they need. And, you know, the financial side of things, that's for another day. I actually have a, somewhere in this room, I have a memento from him. Oh, here it is over here. It's this little kind of squeeze toy, and it's now rubbed away, but it, on the back of it, said, send out more accounts. And apparently this was a gift from his partners in the law firm, reminding him that he did have to bill people for the work he was doing. So that's always been on my desk. matter where I've had my office over the years. After he died, my mother, who had been home with myself and my sister when we were young kids, had to go back to work. She was a dietitian, and she had a pretty hard, punishing job running a hospital kitchen in one of the big hospitals in Calgary.

It was the 70s, and she was a young widow with two little kids, and she had to think about child care. And daycare just wasn't a thing in those days. I mean, not even the debate we have in Canada today about state-funded daycare, just daycare at all, the notion that there would be daycare centers that would care for young children while women, who should be in the home, were working. You know, and instead, women had to cobble together arrangements with a neighbor or a teenage girl down the street who would care for their kids. And my mother knew that's not okay. We need something more reliable and more meaningful and more accessible.

So in the early 70s, when I think the notion of daycare was probably, at least in Alberta, seen as a bit of a communist plot, she became a daycare campaigner. And I have some very clear memories of her coming home from those long, hot days in the kitchen at the Calgary General Hospital, feeding her two hungry kids. And then a babysitter arrived because she was going out for a planning meeting or some sort of. of public event and often carrying with her see-through plastic bags of little buttons, which probably said things like daycare now. I think that is one of my groundings in terms of human rights work because even though we never really had particularly sophisticated conversations

about it at the time, I think it left in me this sense of there are lots of things in this world that aren't right, that are unfair, that need to improve and that can be changed. And we shouldn't just complain about that. We shouldn't just lament the fact that things aren't okay. We should do what we can to try to fix it. What an incredible role model for a would-be lawyer in the future. I wonder if I could linger with your dad for a moment. I wonder if you can tell us how much you understood about what he was doing. I've often wondered that. I don't have clarity of, like, I don't know the kinds of cases that he was arguing. It was a general practice.

I do know he at least once made it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, but it was a very, I've actually seen the legal brief from it. And it was a very specific insurance law question that certainly isn't in my realm of legal knowledge. I have wonderful memories of being in his office, of hanging out in the law library, of swinging around in his swivel chair, playing with his dictaphone. And I certainly feel like I must have been absorbing something. I don't have anything specific that I would attribute to those moments and those experiences. I like to think even just from that reminder of the fact that he didn't like to bill his clients, that there was something good about who he was. And altruistic.

Absolutely, that it was about focusing on people. And so maybe there's some aspect of that that I have absorbed and has shaped my own understanding. and approach to the law and kind of takes one maybe a bit naturally into things like human rights law. I guess I just have to trust that. Forgive me for the delicacy of the question. But I'm curious how much you think your notions of justice and injustice may have been born in the experience of losing your father so early. That's another question I often wonder about. I assume that's in there.

How could it not be? having had that loss. And it was a sudden death. He died of an unexpected heart attack. He and my mother had gone out to a party and he didn't come home. So that's pretty traumatic in the life of an eight-year-old. I assume that that's got to be some sort of opening to empathy and understanding trauma and suffering, even though I would not at all compare that, for instance, to what people are enduring on the ground in Gaza or Ukraine. or Sudan, obviously those are very different experiences, but it's in a broader sense of human experience. Maybe it is that sense of empathy, which again, I think, is so essential to making the universal human rights promise what it's meant to be.

There's a painting hanging on the wall above Alex's desk, a gift from his sister. It's a beautiful image that is a combination of a bit of AI and a bit of her own artistry. she's an amazing artist. It shows him at age 63, with his arms around both his parents. Alex is beaming, and he's the oldest person in the picture. She's been able to put together me as a 63-year-old man, my father as a 38-year-old when he died, and my mother as a 52-year-old when she died.

And you'll see it's this beautiful image of the three of us together and me with my arms. around them. I think there's there's so much in that that it was a beautiful gift to receive. It was before the tour began. And I have a picture. I haven't been able to carry that across the country with me, but I have a picture of it on my phone, which has been with me everywhere. Thank you for answering that. I want to kind of go to the next phase of your life when you were in law school. You were following your dad's footsteps in going to law school. And I wondered if you could paint a picture of Alex Neve, you know, in the classroom and your first brush was someone

who really influenced your thinking about your future and what you were going to do as a lawyer. So I did start law school in 1984. I was at Dalhousie University in Halifax, and I had gone to law school with a vague sense of, I knew I didn't want to be on Bay Street. And there were some, there were some seminal moments along the way in those first couple of years that I think really shaped me. Two were at the law school, but outside of class, which was two incredible guest speakers who I can still remember to this day, I can actually picture the rooms in which they were. Who was the first? One was Elizabeth May, who of course we now know as the leader of the Green Party. Back in, this is probably 1985 or so, she was a recent graduate of Dalhousie Law School,

and she was doing environmental campaigning against, as I recall it, spruce budworms spraying in Cape Breton that was having huge detrimental environmental impact. And it was this incredible reminder or this illustration of the degree to which, you know, one person can take on, you know, massive forces and actually affect change and that the law gives us an opportunity to do so. And you'd never heard anything like that before. I hadn't. I hadn't. And up to that point in time, I had a very probably stayed image of what a lawyer is all about, which was probably shaped by, I don't, things on television, distant memories of my father's law firm. It must have been electrifying. It was.

It was this notion of the lawyer as activist, the lawyer as a changemaker, the lawyer as a campaigner, the lawyer as someone very kind of grounded in and responsible to the community. The other, right around that same time, was the iconic Canadian refugee lawyer, Barbara Jackman. who similarly gave a talk. This was a moment when back to back there had been boats of refugees that had arrived off the Atlantic coast of Canada. One year it was Tamil refugees who were rescued by fishing boats actually off the coast of Newfoundland. The next year it was a boatload of Sikh refugees who showed up milling around early in the morning on a beach way down at the southern tip of Nova Scotia. It was huge news at the time. It was absolutely. And the government went ballistic. The government framed this as a national crisis. There was a summer recall of parliament to deal with the mass influx of refugees into Canada. And so Barbara Jackman showed up in the middle of that to give a lecture. And because she was in court defending some of the refugees who had arrived in boats, but more importantly, was mounting legal challenges to ensure that we actually had a fair approach to refugee to.

determination in Canada. And she was part of an early seminal, one of the very first cases ever heard under what it then was still a fairly new charter of rights. It was only adopted in 1982. And it's a case called the Singh decision. And in the Singh decision, the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed that refugee claimants are covered by the charter, that refugee claimants, therefore, are entitled to fundamental justice, to fairness in a refugee hearing, in an opportunity that they need an opportunity to be heard. Even before they became Canadian. Absolutely.

Even before they've even in any way formally be allowed into the country, they've just presented themselves at the border. So to hear Barbara Jackman talking about all of that, and again, much like with Elizabeth May, for it to bring home to me all of the incredible things that can be done with the law, to advance change, to hear up close and personal to incredible women,

both of them women, both of them trailblazing women, bring it home in a way that I could see myself doing something similar was so, so meaningful. I'm curious what that looks like after the fact. Like, where's the turn in Alex Neve's trajectory or path once you meet someone like that? So in and around that same time, and I actually am a little bit foggy as to the order in which all of these things happened. But one day I saw an announcement. in the Student Union Building on the Dalhousie campus of the monthly meeting of the Halifax chapter of Amnesty International. An organization I had heard a bit about, but not a great deal. I mean, amnesty's kind of a well-known kitchen table kind of known organization in the world today. That

wasn't necessarily so in the mid-80s. But I was certainly interested. I was curious. And there was an interesting guest speaker and they were showing a movie. So I went. And if there is one specific moment when I would say that is when a path opened up and I started going down it, it was in that meeting. And it was on two fronts. The first was as an activist. I was so attracted by the Amnesty International Activism Message, which in 1985 and 2025 still matters. And that is we live in a world of ugly, overwhelming, seemingly insurmountable violence and injustice everywhere. And it's really easy to then sit that out and feel like it's not about you, especially if it isn't directly about you. And thus, you're not going to do anything to try to make change because how could you anyway?

And what Amnesty International said was, but here's one thing you can do right now that may get one prisoner out of jail, that may stop torture in one instance, that may overturn one bad law, that may create one new important body, like, you know, one step at a time. Not that that's a rocket science message, and certainly not in 2025, a rocket science message, but for me, the still kind of wide. eyed, wet behind the ears, trying to figure out what kind of change making I was going to be involved in in the world. It was eye-opening. What's the one thing you can do then? So in that meeting, that night, it was write a letter. And I can actually still remember very explicitly the first letter I wrote. It was on behalf of a law student in El Salvador. This is the mid-80s, so it's U.S.-sponsored death squads in El Salvador. And Beatrice, I don't remember her last name, but Beatrice had been abducted by a death squad in El Salvador. She was a law student. I was a law student. It really

resonated with me, and I sat down and furiously wrote a letter on her behalf. The other thing that was so momentous for me during that meeting was I got clarity about my legal path, and I sat there thinking to myself, I am going to be an international human rights lawyer. I didn't know if that was even such a, it was even a thing. Certainly in my own law school, and I'm pretty sure in all law schools across Canada in those days, there was no course in international human rights law. You might get one or two classes on it in a general course dealing with international law. But it was just so apparent to me that, okay, all of this is about so much. It's about history and it's about culture and it's about greed and it's about power. But it's about law. It's about bad law. It's

about abusing law, it's about absent law, it's about the ways in which law can be part of solutions. So surely there is a central place here for lawyers to be part of the international human rights campaign. And it began there. Do you ever know what happened to Beatrice? I don't know what happened to Beatrice. I did get a response to that letter. I don't know what the percentage I can't remember we used to say that maybe one out of ten times, you know, it fluctuates over time that you actually get a response to an Amnesty International letter you write. You write them regardless because, you know, your assumption and it's played out is that no matter what, response or not, it lands somewhere. Even if it's not read, it's counted, it has impact. But I did get a response.

I remember coming home from classes one day and there was this very fancy looking envelope in our mailbox. It was embossed with a beautiful colored sort of letterhead and et cetera. And it was in Spanish, which in those days I did not know a word of. But I had a very dear friend from Argentina. So I immediately called her up, went over, and she took me through a translation of the letter, which then actually became my first Spanish lesson. I'm far from fluent in Spanish, but I've developed, I mean, ironically, perhaps not surprisingly. My Spanish is particularly strong when talking about injustice and detention and prisoners and torture, less so when it's talking about the weather or social niceties.

The same goes for the other languages he's learned over the years too. You're listening to my conversation with human rights lawyer Alex Neve, the 2025 CBC Massey lecturer. 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 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.cairs.caps.avers.cai.a.

Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cair to learn more. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR.

The room where Alex Neve wrote his Massey lectures is full of pictures of people he's met, people whose memory and stories he holds dear. Sitting here, it's easy to imagine them peering over his shoulder as he writes. You can hear Alex's lectures on ideas. They're titled, Universal, Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World. The acknowledgments in your book, you list a chorus of people, as you say, you know, both living and dead, who you continue to carry with you. We talked about you carrying your parents, but now others who we've met along the way.

And one of them is a man named Gaetan Mutu. And you write, quote, getan Mutu, I see you in your immaculate linen shirt. Can you tell us the story of Gaytan Mutu and what you learned from him about the essence of human rights? So Gaytan Mutu was an Amnesty International colleague. He worked at our international office. He was actually based in Paris and was a longtime researcher who had been responsible for a lot of amnesty's work, especially in Francophone West Africa, but other countries as well. And he and I did our first frontline mission together to Guinea in Western Africa in 2001.

And that was the beginning of a long partnership. I think we've probably in the end did 12 or 15 trips together. I mean, the linen shirt reference is to the fact that, you know, even though we were often in very, very difficult conditions, very isolated regions, often on the edge of war zones, certainly in and out of refugee camps with very, very difficult conditions, frequent visits to overcrowded dangerous prisons. He always was immaculate. He had his linen shirt. He had a favorite hat, a favorite straw hat he would wear, and a leather satchel bursting

at the seams. I never understood exactly what he was always carrying, the straps of which had long ago fallen off, but he carried that under his arm. kind of had a bit of a, maybe a bit of a distracted professor sense to him, but there was nothing, I guess, in that kind of cold and detached professorial sense about him, quite the opposite. What I learned from Gaytown in all of those trips is it's all about people. I mean, of course it's about people. We're on the ground interviewing people.

But I've worked with colleagues and I've heard of colleagues for whom, even in those contexts, the people don't really matter all that much. It's just about getting the facts and details. And people can even be treated in ways that are cruel and only in some ways add to the injustice that has already become so much a part of their lives. Gaytown was the exact opposite for him. Even though, yes, we are here to get as much information as possible, what really matters more than anything is to make sure that people feel heard. and that means people take us where they want to take us. We listen and follow.

We show nothing but respect. And while yes, we need to court the generals and the ministers and all of those officials who were going to need some time with, I was always struck by whenever we did go into those corridors of power in various national capitals across Africa, who he was most intent on finding was, where's the tea lady? Because she's the one who really matters here.

And it was calculating on his part because he knew that if we were in good with the tea lady, number one, we were going to get tea. But number two, she would be the one who would be able to tell him, you know what? There's no one with the minister right now. And follow me. We'll head down. Anyway, I digress a little bit other than to make,

It's just one example amongst many that the best approach to human rights work is when we pay attention to the people who are overlooked. The people who, you know, traditional structures generally tend to think don't really matter all that much. But there's so much that is important and vital that they carry, that they can teach us, and that's the best kind of human rights work. It's really well reflected in your lectures, this lesson from Gaitan Mutu. that you learned over these trips that you took with them, because there are so many stories of individuals that you've come across. So when I became the Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada in 2000, Amnesty Canada couldn't work on Canada,

Amnesty Mexico couldn't on Mexico, Amnesty Sweden couldn't work on Sweden and so forth. We referred to that as the work on own country policy. And there were a few reasons for that. In some countries, obviously there were security concerns. And in some instances, also a worry that if we got involved in partisan politics in our own countries, it might undermine amnesty's impartiality. And then the third, and I think actually this is the most powerful reason of all, is it's amnesty international. The whole raison d'etre of amnesty from the very beginning was, you know, a British lawyer who had an aha moment in 1961 while reading in,

in his newspaper about two Portuguese, so outside of Britain, students, this is a time of cruel military government in Portugal, who had been rounded up simply because they had in a canteen raised their glasses of wine in a toast of freedom and had been brought in front of a military tribunal and sentenced to prison terms for doing so. And so it was very much that notion of breaking through the idea that we don't really pay attention to or care about what happening in the rest of the world. And so there was always a concern if people start doing work on what's happening in their own backyard, which is so there and present, will that become all-consuming? And thus, once again, they'll forget about the rest of the world. So lots of things

were in the mix as to where that policy had come about. But it meant that I could do nothing with respect to very serious issues around indigenous peoples in Canada. That was the first realm that you were thinking about? Absolutely. Like, how could it be that I had to stay silent about that in my human rights activism? So that really felt like something that needed to be fixed. And what exactly that you thought needed to be fixed? What was it that you were seized with as an issue that was facing the indigenous community in Canada that required the attention of Amnesty International? There were many issues immediately. And people were coming to us because they saw us as a human rights organization.

So there was one of the earliest cases that had already come to amnesty because it predated me taking up the role, but then was still very, very present, was the case of Dudley George. Dudley George, a land protester who was shot dead by an OPP sniper during a land protest at Iperwash Provincial Park in Ontario in 1995,

which in any other part of the world would be giving rise to all sorts of concerns about is this an extrajudicial execution, is this unlawful use of force, is there racism and discrimination behind this? But where was amnesty on that issue? Already in those early days, the very serious concerns about violence against indigenous women and girls were they hadn't yet seized the national agenda, but certainly, especially some incredible indigenous women leaders and activists were coming to us with that. Land rights issues. There it wasn't even just the question of, is this something we can take up because it's a domestic issue? Sorry, no, we can't. It was also, amnesty was even still grappling with land rights, human rights. Are we really talking the same thing here? So there was still a lot of learning there. So there was so much crying out for our attention. And these were by any measure the most pressing human rights concerns in Canada long, long unaddressed. And, you know,

One of the country's premier human rights organizations couldn't engage, it didn't feel right. In 2001, Alex helped push for an end to the work on own country policy. Not long after that, Amnesty International Canada began working on a groundbreaking report on missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. The lead researcher was Mohawk lawyer Bev Jacobs. And I remember one of the very first meetings I was having with Bev. and she told me, I want you to prepare yourself for the fact that you're about to embark on a journey where you're going to come to understand that there is not an indigenous person anywhere in this country without a story of a mother, a sister, an aunt, a daughter, a cousin, who they hold very, very dear, who is missing, has been murdered, or has been through agonizing levels of violence because they are indigenous.

And it was those last words in particular. I guess it was the first and the last words. There is not a person, not an indigenous person anywhere in this country. And then that last bit of because they are indigenous. How did that hit you? It was heavy. I think intellectually it made sense, but she brought it home to me in a way that was gutterol.

And it was so true through the work that we did alongside Bev. I often did travel with her to various parts of the country. But all conversations I've had anywhere with indigenous leaders, with people on reserves, with indigenous peoples living in urban centers, academics, students. It is so true. And it is such a deep, deep indictment of us as a country that we've allowed that to be reality for decades and decades and decades without even paying attention to it, without even hearing it. I'm wondering what adjective you would attach to the way it changed how you feel about this country and just as a Canadian citizen,

knowing that that was operating in the background without us really ever hearing about it. I suppose maybe the first thing I felt, and it deepened during those months of working closely with Bev, was shame. I felt shame about my country. I felt shame to be a Canadian, even if at the same time I could embrace all sorts of other things that were powerful and important and wonderful about our country, but a sense of deep shame that that could be part of our national story. Fortunately, because I was working with people like Bev and other incredible activists and campaigners and family members who were who were doing incredible work, that shame quickly transformed into determination and conviction, and I guess fueled.

And not only for me, I think, you know, for all of us within Amnesty International, we embrace that work with a sense of purpose. But I think to a certain review was perhaps something we had never even fully encountered ever before in our human rights work because it was so close to home. In 2002, Mahar Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria was detained in New York and sent secretly to Syria, where he was imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured for almost a year. Alex got a call from Maher's wife, Monja Muzig, shortly after his detention, became deeply involved in her fight to bring him home.

So I was at the Montreal airport the night Mayher returned home. I was behind the scenes in a quiet room that had been made available. Monia, who had initially her own first personal reunion with Mayher, and then came into the room with Mayher to introduce him to the rest of us. And I could just tell, even before Mayher spoke, it was so clear that whatever he had been through was harrowing. And I immediately thought of torture. There was a haunted look in his eyes, a drawn look in his face. And I could just tell by the way he carried his body that he had been through something horrific. It was a Syrian prison after all.

Absolutely. An Amnesty International had been documenting torture in Syrian prisons for decades. The experience in the airport was frenzied and chaotic. I and another activist went out with Meher and Monia to sort of meet the press. Meher and Monia made very short statements, and then they left. And then the two of us, myself and Amanda Rietz Saluji, were the ones who stayed to engage with journalists. It went on and on and on. It was intense.

It went on late into the night. And that I think it was around midnight that I finally found myself on a bus going back home to Ottawa. And the next day, Amnesty staff were obviously very intent on wanting to hear what had happened. And so I shared with people what had been like. and the encounter with Mayher and my early sense already that he was quite keen on wanting to pursue some sense of justice for what he'd been through. And then I had a break and I realized I needed a sandwich. And I left the front door of the amnesty office and was just walking two blocks down to a subway shop. And I started crying. And it's one of the very, very, very, very,

few times ever in my human rights work that I've had tears. I have felt sadness. I've felt deep sadness, but I've never, I'm not, I'm not someone who cries a lot in general. And I think it was that even though I did not yet have the answers, I hadn't started interviewing. That came later where, where Mayher very, you know, it's incredible the trust and confidence he had in me to to open up and share everything he had been through. And I did learn firsthand about the brutal torture he had experienced. I didn't know any of that yet. I also didn't yet know what had Canada's role been. It seemed apparent that there had been a role, but how complicit, how illegal that had been, none of that was in front of us yet, but I knew it. I knew it in my bones. And it was

shaking me to the core to realize. So at that point, we'd been working for, I guess, about a year globally on all of the U.S. transgressions in the War on Terror. Guantanamo Bay was a thing by then, and suddenly I was realizing, this is about us. I don't know in what way. I don't know how deeply, but I know this is about us as a country, as a people, and therefore this is about me. And that's where the tears came from. And I did then, I mean, the tears stopped. And I think instead what took their place was a deep conviction that wherever Meherrara and Monia Mazig needed us to go in seeking those answers and in exploring how many levels deep we needed to go in terms of coming to account. for Canada's role, we would do so.

And you did, and successfully so. On the other hand, I'm curious how you're thinking changed when you realize, even today, that there's kind of this like a veritable industry in Canada, both maybe even in official circles, but certainly in everyday society, that works hard at othering Canadians who don't look like the majority. What do you think about that now? Because that really hasn't changed. And perhaps with the technology we have today, we see it even more than ever. How do you maintain your faith in process when you know that that is at the heart of what happened here? So the activism and the advocacy, the incredible solidarity that grew from all corners of the country, for Meher's case, and then other similar cases that soon came to light, Abdullah al-Malchi.

Ahmed Elmati, Muyaad Nuridin, of course, Omar Cader, all of these cases of Canadians ensnared unjustly and illegally in the worst aspects of the war on terror, which I prefer to call a war on human rights. And we made headway, even though all of those men and their families had been through these horrific experiences, there was justice, there was compensation, there was redress. So it did seem like for a number of years there, there was all these incredible reminders of, yes, we can prevail. The people can prevail. People who have been through horrific experiences of being abandoned in foreign prisons and subjected to torture with the complicity of their own government can prevail because we have the power. And that hopefully, out of that, a lesson had been learned that we can't other people. We can't kick

people out of the Human Rights Club because of their faith, because of their nationality, because of the color of their skin, that the universality of the human rights promise does apply to all of us. And it does even apply in the face of huge challenges like 9-11 and very grave concerns about national security. So surely some incredible lessons were learned. But 20 years later, 2025, I have been doing a lot of work in northeast Syria where tens of thousands of foreign nationals have been abandoned in detention camps and prisons, all tarred with the same brush of in some way being militants or supporters or camp followers of ISIS. No justice, horrific prison conditions, no charges. no opportunity to get themselves out of those prisons. Torture, health concerns, tuberculosis has run rampant.

And this has been going on for years. And there are Canadians in the mix. In many quarters, there's zero empathy for those Canadians. And so once again, we seem to be back in this notion of we can other people right out of the Human Rights Club because of who they are, because of the choices they made, because of their faith, because they're dual nationals, you name it. There's all sorts of reasons why people reach these easy conclusions that,

oh, well, you know, that's unfortunate what they're going through, but they had it coming, they deserve it. We certainly shouldn't be doing anything to lift a finger to bring them home to their country. So have we learned the lessons? It's been a grave disappointment for me to see that the government has retreated to a lot of the same approaches, a lot of the same secrecy, a lot of the same complete disregard for the fundamental rights of Canadian citizens, as we were seeing in those days after 9-11. So after all the time you have spent in this field, do you feel like rights are more respected now?

Do you feel there's been enough progress to really make you feel like you've made a difference and that others have made a difference? Or are we kind of in the same place? I think my answer is yes and no, because I take both a long view and an immediate view. And in the long view, you know, if I go back to 1948 as one obvious marker, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yes, there's been incredible progress. There's been abysmal, disgraceful, shameful failure at every turn. But there has been incredible progress. There is much more equality. the world, gender equality has moved immensely in that time period. That's not very meaningful right now for women in Afghanistan, however. But yes, in the long range, I do see progress. And if anything, you know, that's what continues to put wind in my sails. But then I look at these last three to five years. And it's easy to focus on Donald Trump, but it's, it's of course not only about Donald Trump. It's about genocide in Gaza. It's about Vladimir Putin's contempt for international

law with his invasion of Ukraine. It's the fact that a humanitarian and human rights crisis beyond belief has been playing out amidst the last two years of renewed civil war in Sudan. And who's paying attention to that? The city of El Fasheir has fallen to the rebel group. And there was a report today saying that the impact of that has been so extreme. stream that the blood spilled can be seen in satellite images from space. Just sit with that for a minute. Who's talking about that today? So it is very tempting right now to feel not only that we're losing ground, but have we maybe lost the battle? But I will not go there. We cannot go there. And what has perhaps maybe renewed my hopefulness is this Massey tour, because everywhere I've

gone, I'm being reminded that there are legions of people out there who feel exactly that. They too are feeling the horror of these last three to five years, but they are not willing to give up. And they recognize that what it means is we need to dig deeper, we need to find more energy, we need to renew our alliances, we need to build new connections, and above all, else, we have to stop being silent. Not that all of us are silent, but there are far too many people who, even though they care deeply, do remain silent because it's a fearful time. To speak out is to invite consequences, consequences at work, consequences at school, consequences with neighbors, consequences on social media. And so it's very understandable why there is so much

silence. But this is the time where all of us have to break the silence. And I've been seeing theaters and public libraries full of people who are breaking the silence. Throughout this trip, we've also had the privilege of being with your wife, Pat, who has been by your side and working with you on some of these issues since those days in Halifax, working with Amnesty International. I'm wondering if you can give an idea of what you've learned about human rights from her. So Pat very much works in the community. She works with the elderly. She works in a community center, just a few blocks from our home for senior citizens who are still living in their homes.

So it's programming ranging from respite care for families dealing with a loved one who has Alzheimer's through to a speaker series. I've sometimes been there to be one of the speakers and exercise classes. and art classes and language classes. And it's many things, but it's human rights work. It's, to go back to Eleanor Roosevelt's words, that's a perfect illustration of the small places close to home. And I don't think she ever describes herself. I know she doesn't describe herself in any circles as, you know, that she's a human rights activist. But that's what she's doing every single day. And I think just being by her side, watching her do that work, seeing how naturally she approaches all of that with one fundamental, which is that whoever it is, who's crossing my path, who's coming in the front door at the community center, who's who has a complaint about one of the programs, the most important thing is that I need to make sure they realize they matter.

And I think that models and demonstrates what human rights is all about. And to your children, I'm curious. I mean, we sort of started this conversation talking about what you learned from your parents as a child about human rights. And now you're, not now, but you have been a father for quite a number of years of three children. And a lot of parents struggle to talk to their children about what's happening in our world. You've seen more of the horrors out there than most people. First, how have you approached those conversations with your children? And two, what have you learned from them?

So I was careful about what I did and did not bring home. I mean, when I started the Secretary General job at Amnesty International, all three of our kids were still under the age of six. Some of it, obviously, they absorbed just by hearing things. I remember our eldest famously, I don't know, he was about eight years old. At one time he and I were in the kitchen together. He was sitting at the table, I don't know, coloring or. or working on some craft, and I was preparing dinner, and CBC radio was on in the background,

and suddenly his voice chirps up, and he says, oh, daddy, things are bad in Chechnya again. And I hadn't even realized that he had any awareness about Chechnya or that he was tracking what was playing out in Chechnya. So some of it was obviously just because it was around them. They absorbed it. And that really was how I wanted to approach things. much of it came through relationships and who came into the house. They, at a young age, came to know Meher, Arar and Monia Mazig, and their two children.

And we often had dinner together. And so human rights not only became kind of close to home, but became real and had a very real and human and lovely fun face. It has become part of who they are. They all in different ways continue to very much care about human rights in our rights in our world. What I've learned from them is, you know, I think they just kept me true and honest and grounded. And whether that was, to go back to a word, I think we used a long time ago, sanctuary, whether the home, but they as children in this home were a sanctuary, I just got focused on minor hockey games and today's homework. And that was real and refreshing. And there was learning in

that for me in terms of what matters and what we are in each other's lives. So all I can say is that, you know, from the moment they were born to today, when they're all in their kind of mid-20s to early 30s, they've been nothing but a gift. Back to the gift that you received from your sister, this incredible piece of art that depicts you and your parents. If you could imagine a conversation with them right now after this incredible tour that you've been. on, what would you tell them about how it's all turned out? Oh, my. I don't need to score, but your career, your work, how it's all turned out.

I guess I would want to thank them without fully knowing what I'm thanking them for. And maybe that would hopefully lead to the deeper conversation that I've, I guess, in many respects, always been cheated of in my life because they did die. at such young ages, where I could truly start to connect the dots a bit more and understand what of them is in me and what their own approach and understanding of the world we live in today would be. But it would very much be, I think, about wanting to know more. That says everything about you. You're always wanting to know more.

What a privilege to watch you do what you do. Thank you so much for the lecture tour, for the insights, and for this incredible conversation. Oh, it's been a rich opportunity. I thank you, Nala. From his apple red and apple green room in Ottawa, with his parents and the many other people he treasures surrounding him, that was 2025 CBC Massey lecturer Alex Neve. You can hear Alex's lectures titled Universal Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World, on ideas. Go to cbc.ca.ca slash massies for more information.

This episode and the Massey Lectures are produced by Pauline Holdsworth. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Sam McNulty. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC. www.ca.combs.