Ideas - Who has a ‘right to life’? (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published more than 75 years ago. It's a different era now. IDEAS explores the rights promised in this document and what rights we need for the future in a five-part series. We start with an examination of what the right to "life, liberty, and security of person" means, and how it could transform our world. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 2, 2024.

I'm Joshua Jackson, and I'm returning for the Audible original series, Oracle, Season 3, Murder at the Grandview. Six forty-somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case, and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required, anything's possible.

This world's gonna eat you alive. Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, Welcome to Ideas in the Summer. I'm Nala Ayed. This week, we're featuring the panel discussions we recorded live at the Stratford Festival about the evolution and future of human rights. How do we create a better world? How do we articulate the kind of future in which we want to live? Born out of the devastation of the Second World War, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was intended to set the world on a new course. A little more than 75 years after its adoption at the United Nations, we're talking about that document and how well it stands up to the test of time. Some of

the questions we'll be asking here, what new worlds were these rights supposed to create? What's the relationship between rights and realities between calling for a more just world and actually bringing it into being? Today's panel is the first in the series and we're looking at Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right to life, liberty and security of the person. So on our panel today, starting on my right here, Cindy Ewing is an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto.

She has written on the history of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the drafting of constitutional rights in South Asia, the right to national self-determination and the rights of minorities. Leilani to national self-determination and the rights of minorities. Leilani Farha is the global director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing, finance and climate, and a former UN special rapporteur on the right to housing.

Aziza Kanji is a legal academic and journalist based in Toronto. Her work focuses on anti-colonial and anti-racist approaches to international law, state violence, and the war on terror. Please join me in welcoming our panel. So let's start with what the article states simply and clearly that quote, everyone has a right to life, liberty and security of the person. So I'd like to come to each of you and ask you this in thinking about the past 75 years or more than 75 years. Could you paint a picture of a moment in time about when the idea behind Article 3, the right to life, liberty and security of the person came to life.

So Cindy, with you to start. Sure. I'd like to think about the drafting of the article. This is 1946. The Second World War has just ended. And there is a group of experts in Long Island, the Commission on Human Rights, that's drafting this article discussing what is human security, who is and what is the human person. And the Soviet delegate, Sergey Pavlov, has quite a pointed comment to make.

He brings up the fact that the definition of the human person is not yet defined, has to be defined. And when we talk about human security, we're really talking about the integrity of the body of the person. And the big elephant in the room is the United States. The US delegate watching Eleanor Roosevelt, here Sergey Pavlov tell her that the United States is guilty of violating human security and the body of the person all the time because it is a country that has committed more lynchings than any other country in the

world. And so I think this comment by the Soviet delegate, of course, painted and inflected by the Cold War, really raises questions for us to think about today about who do we include as a human person, whose personhood counts, whose security counts. Aziza. Thank you, Nala. Thank you everyone who's here. Thank you to everyone who has helped create this beautiful space for us to have this conversation.

Sometimes it's easier to talk about difficult things in a beautiful space. So thank you. When you speak about this right being brought to life, I think we more often see how it has not been brought to life at all. And so any moment over the past 76 years could be a moment for thinking about this absolute abandonment of the rights to life, liberty, security of person for the majority of people in the world. From the time of the drafting, when as Cindy has said, the US was engaged in lynchings of black people and was also just a few years after as many as four million Indians in Bengal had starved to death under British policies, explicitly enforced

conditions of famine imposed during World War II. We see it in the conflagrations of the present in Kashmir, the site of the world's most concentrated military occupation by an Indian army whose abuses and tortures and extrajudicial killings are immunized explicitly by law, and yet it is the occupied Kashmiris who are represented as a security threat to the army that is occupying them. We see it with the Rohingya casualties again of Myanmar's quote unquote war on terror. We first met, the CBC producers and I, we first met when we were at the International Court of Justice for the first round of provisional measures hearings on the Rohingya genocide several years ago and yet we see that genocide permitted to continue to unfold.

And we see it in Gaza today. Sight of in just four months, the first four months of this genocide, more children killed than in all of the world's quote-unquote conflicts combined over the past four years. Thank you and we'll come back to some of those themes as we go on. Leilani. So we're talking about what is the backbone of not just the international legal order, but really I think the backbone of society, the right to life. I wanna take you to the economic engine of Canada, Toronto.

I wanna take you to a park that I visited in 2021. Standing in that park, I could look up and see skyscrapers, new condos being built, cranes in the horizon. And in that same park, I want you to picture a whole bunch of tents and sleeping bags and people living in those conditions, no running water available to them, no porto let or portable toilet, no structure within which to walk, no door to lock, just a little zipper enclosure to protect themselves from intruders. And when I talk to those people to find out like, what's your experience here?

How do you feel? What they say to me, and this is not exclusive to the encampment in Toronto that I visited, it's every person living in homelessness with whom I've spoken around the world, they say the same thing. They feel abandoned by their governments. They just want to be recognized as human beings. They just want dignity. So the right to life, pretty meaningful.

Great. Thank you. It's such a range of issues that the three of you raise and so many different snapshots. I think it's worth, even though it feels as though those words are so intuitive, life, liberty and security of the person, I wouldn't mind just kind of going over more the idea of that, rather than what it represents. Can you each kind of give me a sense of what you take away from the protection of your life, liberty and security? What does that mean? I think that's such an important question because these words life, liberty, security of person,

we often take it for granted as common sense that we know what they mean. But like so many things, everything in international law, the meaning is deeply contested and what is excluded is as important as what is included. You know, being trained in law, you're often taught to think of these international provisions as covenants, either as almost something that descended from above as a natural fact, like Athena emerging fully formed out of the head of Zeus, or even more perniciously as the gift of European colonizers to the rest of the world. And these ideas about international law are so pervasive in ways that erase the deep contestation and resistance. And so when we look to the history of what is now Article 3 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

the idea of what constituted security was also deeply contested. Does it include economic security? An amendment that would have stated this explicitly in Article 3, that it includes the necessities, the economic and social necessities for human development, was defeated during the drafting by the slimmest of margins by 21 to 20. It was global South countries that voted for it. Countries that voted against it included Canada, apartheid South Africa, the US, the UK, France. And so, so much if we take for granted as the natural parameters of legal protections. Oh, yes, of course course we can't guarantee things

that are necessary for a basic dignified human life, like housing, like water, like food. So much of what we take as for granted as being outside of the parameters of what law can include are in fact not natural limitations at all, but rather the product of power reasserting itself. Cindy, bring you up. Yeah, if I can just build on that.

You know, what prevails and what we have today is really a Lockean notion of the right to life, liberty, and security of the person. But Aziza is completely right that that was so contested in the moment of the drafting, even in the origins of this system of international law that we've had that global South countries have instead called for a much broader conception

for the holistic welfare and well-being of an individual person and their communities as well. Not only an individual notion of rights, but a collective notion of rights. And that continues to be a front line in how we think about rights and rights struggle. But the interesting thing about the Lockean notion of rights is that even in the Second Treatise of Government,

when he talks about life, liberty, and possessions, i.e. property, there's actually another word But the interesting thing about the Lockean notion of rights is that even in the Second Treatise of Government, when he talks about life, liberty, and possessions, i.e. property, there's actually another word in that line, which is health. And so even in this most narrow and perhaps outdated enlightenment narrative of the human rights that we have today, there was a broader understanding of what encompasses true human flourishing

to include things like one's right to development, one's right to housing, access to health and education, protection over one's language and culture. So Article 3 is really important, I'll just say, because it's the first article in the Universal Declaration that enumerates rights. So it is the foundational article of the rest of our system of international human rights law for thinking about what specific rights do we as a global community promise to uphold and protect? Or at least aspire to.

Aspire, right, and aspire to. So that's part of the very foundation of it as well. Lani, anything you want to add? Yeah. Just a couple of things. First of all, I think the right to life is used to determine who counts and who doesn't. I think right now that's where we're at. So it's super, this conversation is just super important in the here and now. One thing I do, I want to defend the Universal Declaration. I'm going to try to defend it. It's early.

That's right. What is actually beautiful about the UDHR as we call it is that it actually does include a whole panoply of rights. So it's got civil and political rights in there and it does have social and economic rights in there So there is the right to an adequate standard of living Included in the Universal Declaration and it creates a hole it was after that in the 60s when The UDHR was turned into

treaties and two very separate treaties one treaty dealing with civil and political rights and separate treaties. One treaty dealing with civil and political rights and another dealing with social and economic rights. And the failing, in my opinion, of the international community was the failure to include the right to life in the treaty on social and economic rights, which goes to Aziza's points very pointedly and Cindy's points as well. So I think the Universal Declaration can be upheld a little bit upheld. Yes, colonial and imperial in many ways. We're learning that too much today, but it did at least have this holistic vision that got lost along the way.

Well, you've all kind of raised bits about the beginning points of the document. And I want to pick up from that the vision. As we said, it came up in the points of the document. And I want to pick up from that, the vision. As we said, it came up in the ashes of the Second World War, and the idea was to kind of reinvent this, or invent a new world. It seemed like a big point of departure. I wonder if it actually was. Was it actually revolutionary at the moment?

That's not the right word, but was it actually a big change from what existed before? Cindy? There hadn't been a single document to enumerate specific rights that anyone everywhere could have access to. We have the French Declaration from 1789, those were for citizens. We have written constitutions like the American Constitution also for citizens recognized

by that state. The Universal Declaration is distinctive because it identifies a set of rights and entitlements to everyone, regardless of your status, stature, or place. And so in that respect, there was something new about it, but many of the ideas that undergird the Universal Declaration, the UDHR, speak to many long-standing philosophical, religious and cultural traditions. And so there are deep historical continuities that are both inflicted by enlightenment thinking, but like Aziza said, like also by very strong colonial

structures governed by this club of empires that was in charge of the UN, that invented the UN really as a way to hold the wartime alliance together and ensure that those allies could hold on to their colonial territories. So both the more optimistic narrative, theological, triumphal narrative that we tell about international human rights is absolutely on the backs of enslaved, colonized peoples. And those have to be told together to really appreciate the full picture that people had in mind at that time. And it also helps us understand why many aspects of it don't work today.

Yeah. Aziza, was it actually a sea change? I think it's important to note that though we refer to it as universal, most of the world was actually colonized at the time, not permitted to join the UN. And so the universality was really the universality of colonial peoplehood, the colonizers who recognized amongst themselves as fully human, predicated on the subhumanization, infrahumanization of the vast majority of the world. We talk about World War II as this breach in the world order, but underlying and behind this breach was the continuity of

colonial atrocities and violence. At the very same time as the Nuremberg tribunals were being held to call the Nazis to account for their grotesque crimes against humanity during the war, the French were committing yet another massacre in Algeria. And as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre commented at the time, this was then such a common occurrence that no one even thought to hold the French to account in the way that the Nazis were being held to account at Nuremberg. Can we go back actually, Cindy, to you for a moment

and just review the political context of the time? I mean, we've mentioned what was going on in Algeria, we mentioned the Second World War, but just paint the picture, and borrowing from your very first microcosm story, just paint the picture of what was going on at the time geopolitically. Yeah, so the drafting took place

from the beginning of the year 1946 until the very end of the year 1948, when it was passed and adopted by the UN General Assembly, which we now celebrate around the world as Human Rights Day. But one thing that's very interesting about the adoption of the UDHR on December 10th, 1948, is that the next day, the UN adopted a resolution on the Arab-Israeli War, founding the State of Israel.

And those two histories are deeply intertwined. The recognition of the possibilities of genocide in the world, trying to redress the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, which very much took for granted its right to commit violence against the security of the person imposing death penalty on six million Jews, was also accompanied by this ongoing violence in the same territory, which then the UN sought to conclude through both its partition plan and its limited mediation of the Arab-Israeli war. So those histories are deeply intertwined and we see that playing out today even still. And so at the time of the drafting, this is in the context of

the war, talking about the security of the person had a lot to do with thinking about what did the Nazi regime mean by its own notion of security, but then trying to move beyond that. And so there were discussions about the death penalty discussions, as I mentioned, about the human person and bodily integrity. Did that refer to only human persons? Did it refer to only the physical body? Was there also metaphysical or economic or cultural security that we get to think about as well.

And so there are a lot of questions on the table in terms of drafting a common standard for mankind. That's what they called it at the time, which then was also challenged by the Indian delegation, Hansa Mehta, who talked about the need to talk about all persons rather than just all men. And so a lot of issues were on the table about who counted and who didn't count and thinking about the security of the person.

What was the historical definition of liberty? In the time of 1946, many of the drafters, including the Canadian law professor John Humphrey, liberty had a lot to do with protections against the death penalty. It also had to do with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment in 1946 but Liberty since then has Expanded and evolved significantly to think about the flourishing of that person not just the preservation of their bodily integrity But also the expansion of one's Liberty in terms of movement their ability to associate their ability to access one's liberty in terms of movement, their ability to associate, their ability to access institutions, services, to receive entitlements.

And so, yeah, so at the time, Liberty really had a much more specific framing in the context of the Second World War and the laws of the time, but it's evolved a lot. Lelani, you, a moment ago, were offering a sort of a qualified defense of the document. I wonder if you could think about that time and what you would point to as the biggest gap we've inherited in the formation of the imagination of this article. I mean, where is the major gap in your thinking? Well, I think what Cindy just exposed leads me to a place where I feel like what happened when the UDHR came into being was actually a mask. That's the feeling I get these days

where it was masking so much of the tensions between the Global South and the dominant between the Global South and the dominant colonizing countries in the Global North. It was masking the fact that the following year, well that year, I mean it masked what we call the Nakba, the displacement of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. So for me it's like, it's a masking. So I don't know that that's an omission because it was very purposeful. I think we see now it was done brick by brick. It's a fortress that's been created and we're now in a position right now where we're trying to figure out position right now where we're trying to figure out, okay, what do we do with this fortress that is clearly not working? In terms of omission, if you really want me to sort of drill down, like the UDHR as a

practical legal instrument that I use maybe in my daily legal practice as a human rights lawyer, it's kind of got a lot of what I need. I'll be honest. The damage in the omission came when the treaties were formed and the treaty that actually codifies the human right to housing doesn't codify the right to life. And lawyers and governments in particular states have used that very cleverly to say, okay, maybe as a government I shouldn't do anything that jeopardizes the right to life, but where I fail to do things, like I fail to have a fulsome welfare state, that doesn't trigger right to life concerns. So you can be deported into homelessness and that could be regarded as a right to life

issue. But if you're born into homelessness in this country, that's not considered a right to life issue. That's a pretty big omission, I'd say. Follow up on that. You said everything you need is contained within the document on this topic. Can you just expand as to how you use it? I mean, how, how is, how practically? How I would use the UDHR.

Yeah. In, in the, in the pursuit of the right to housing. Yeah. So because the Universal Declaration includes this whole scope of rights from the right to health and education and housing to the right to life. It allows, enables me to understand and reflect the law back to the experiences of people. When I talk to people living in homelessness, their lives integrate all these things. You have half the life expectancy of a house person,

if you're living in homelessness, half the life expectancy, right? For that person, housing is as important as life itself, as dignity, as the right to water, health, sanitation, food. They're not chopping themselves up and saying, well, I only need the right to housing, right? Or I only need water. People, all of our existence is multifaceted. All of those things is what makes us vibrant and what makes communities vibrant. And without those pieces altogether,

we can't have fulsome lives. We can't have dignified lives. So I use the UDHR only as a reflection of what people's experiences actually are. ["Pomp and Circumstance"] On ideas, you've been listening to Brave New Worlds and the first in a series of programs recorded at the Stratford Festival,

exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its meaning in our own time and its significance for the future. You can hear ideas wherever you get your podcasts and on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app. I'm Nala Eyed. I'm Joshua Jackson and I'm returning for the audible original series Oracle season three, Murder at the Grandview. Six forty-somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them

was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case, and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required, anything's possible. This world's gonna eat you alive. Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible. Hey, how's it going? Amazing! I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously?

I could really use their help? It was easy! I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses, gave me a few options, and helped me along the way. You had a ton of debt, and you're saying Credit Counseling Society helped with all of it? Yup, and now I can sleep better at night. Ha ha ha! Right on! When debts got you, you've got us.

Give Credit Counseling Society a call today. Visit NoMoreDets.org. In today's panel discussion, we've been talking about Article 3, the right to security. I'm speaking with Aziza Kanji, a legal academic and journalist based in Toronto. Leilani Farha, the global director of The Shift, an international human rights organization focused on housing.

And Cindy Ewing, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto. Going back to the history, Chilean lawyer Hernan Santa Cruz, one of the drafters, said that the Article, Article Three, and others spring from the belief that, one of the drafters, said that the article, article three, and others spring from the belief that the interests of the individual come before those of the state and that the state should not be allowed to deprive the individual of dignity and basic rights. Why were individual

rights versus the state seem to be crucial at that time? What was that debate kind of revolving around? I'm not a historian, so perhaps Cindy could speak to that. But what I will say is that the contest and the tension between individual and state rights appears in the very way that the term security is used throughout the human rights infrastructure. We're talking specifically about Article III, which speaks to security of person,

but security appears in another context in these international human rights documents as well, which is the right to national security on the parts of states, which functions as a legitimate limitation on rights, a reason for states to be able to infringe on people's rights in the name of protecting quote unquote national security. Like the name of protecting quote-unquote national security. Like the language of human rights, national security is also something that we now take for granted as a concept, as if it's been with us forever. But this too has a very particular history. And the language of national security really emerged again in the 1940s as a way of rationalizing

and justifying state exercises of violence that in many ways have been built into the architecture of international law. It's extremely misleading to talk about international law in a way that only focuses on human rights because the paradox of legitimization of state violence has been built into the international system itself. International law depends on the consent of states, and it in many ways authorizes and enables exercises of state violence in ways outside

of international human rights law. So for example, there's international humanitarian law, an extremely misleading term for what is actually the laws of war, and which permits quite an extensive ambit of permissible state violence in the name of supposedly necessary and proportional violence as we're seeing Israel invoking these very laws

in the genocide it is inflicting in Gaza right now. I do want to expand a bit on that because part of the intention of the document was to build a more peaceful world and I wondered if you could, Cindy and then Leilani, just how well you think, how well do you think that right to life and security has helped us deal with conflict in general? So Cindy and then Leilani, it's a big question. I mean, I know.

A declaration of principles can't force anyone to do anything. And so ultimately, even establishing, just putting out into the world these aspirations or these standards are violated on a routine basis. And so then what is the purpose? And this is a conversation we were having earlier about, you know, when I teach my students, my Gen Z 18 year old undergraduates, they are completely over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the notion of human rights because they can see a long history of its inability to both prevent and limit conflict. And if anything, as Aziza suggested and stated very clearly, used in service of achieving violent ends.

So are your students right? So you know, in that case, I think they are onto something very real, that the notion that we can eliminate the scourge of war through a declaration of principles, of course, is quite naive. But as Leilani was pointing out, the Declaration offers us a way to enter into the experiences of people who weren't otherwise recognized by states. And so the value of institutions that operate at this global level is that they are meant to check,

or at least expose, violations by states. But as Ziza pointed out, the nation-state as kind of our unit of the international system has built within it the prerogative to commit violence. And ignoring that is to our detriment, and certainly to the detriment of the communities that suffer under it. And so I think it's about holding these complex ideas

at the same time and recognizing the possibilities that are enabled by them, but the continued inability of them to solve that problem or provide a clear path forward. So yeah, I mean, I think, I think our young people today, especially our brave students who have stood in solidarity with occupied peoples around the world are teaching us something very important. Yeah. I, that really resonates what you just said. I guess what I, what I want to put back or put out on the floor is, is it the law that's problematic or is it men behaving badly? And I mean, men, and it's mostly men, not exclusively, men are behaving very badly right now. When you have a state-driven

system, which is the UN system, and I mean Aziza just, you know, elucidated so beautifully the problematic of states and the violence that they want to perpetrate in the name of land grabs really, I mean power grab, land grab. So it's obviously the UN system is inherently problematic, but is the law itself problematic? Is there something inherently problematic about a universal right to housing? Well I say no, that's not problematic. And I've had, I was a UN special rapporteur, I was a UN mechanism myself, an independent expert, and I used the universality of that right wherever I went,

and that was the beauty of it. So I met with the state of India, and I said to them, you're violating the right to housing. And I met with the state of India and I said to them you're violating the right to housing and I met with The government of Portugal and I said you're violating the right to housing and I met with dot dot dot so the lack of accountability within the UN system is What's the if you asked me about an omission that was the omission? I mean we oh well we have the ICC, the ICJ. Well, with no teeth. Yeah.

There are other mechanisms within the UN system. The reporters are a mechanism with no teeth. I mean, I could mouth off basically. But it's a theoretical thing, but I think we can all maybe agree that had there been some kind of accountability, then those documents would probably not exist. Am I going too far by saying that? I think it's a critical thing, but I think we can all maybe agree that had there been some kind of accountability, then those documents would probably not exist. Am I going too far by saying that? I think that's absolutely right. I mean, especially if the Global South had their fair say,

they would have wanted the northern colonial states to be held accountable. And so, no, it would have, right? It wouldn't have worked. So... You're the historian. Cindy, do you want to take that? I'm in. No, I just... I find that it's very difficult to think through counterfactuals, but it's an interesting question

because what if we didn't have the last 500 years of history, in which settler colonies determined what was permissible civilized language and what would be acceptable to say at a world level. What other imaginaries of possibility could have been in 1945 through 1948 that make it possible to think about true liberty of the person and of communities at the same time. The point is there were other systems of thought. This wasn't a moment in which that was the only possibility. Aziza pointed out it was contested because other systems of knowledge were prevented from having their say in these gilded halls of the United Nations.

The international legal scholar William Shabess includes a very interesting and telling anecdote in his most recent book on the inscription of the color line in the international legal system. And he points out then when rights to petition the United Nations in order to address violations of the rights being enumerated in the international human rights legal architecture, when a right for people to petition the UN in order to contest the violations of their rights was raised, the Canadian delegate for instance was opposed to it, but the

reason he gave was that, oh well you know as Canadians we believe in human rights but not all of the rest of the world believes in human rights. In other words, attributing the responsibility for their own opposition to binding human rights mechanisms to the to the problems and the backwardness of the global South to which the representative from Tanzania responded. The global North has absolutely no right to take such a patronizing and condescending attitude towards the rest of the world. You created colonization and enslavement from which we continue to suffer. And so that's why throughout you it's so necessary that we go back and and read the history of these draftings

in order to understand that a the way that the system is now was not inevitable and that b these histories of resistance often by black and brown women representatives from newly decolonized countries to the UN has been a persistent feature throughout the system and it's a failure of accountability that continues to exist so that in the latest report from the newly appointed or the most recently appointed UN special rapporteur on counterterrorism Saul, he makes the point about how the, um, extreme disparities in resource allocation reflects the completely, um, the Gulf of prioritization between protecting

human rights versus protecting state violence. The apparatus is if the UN that deal with enforcing counterterrorism have a combined total of 300 employees. His office, which is dedicated to checking human rights abuses in the exercise of counterterrorism, has a total of three employees. 300 to three. In that disparity right there, we see the gulf in which the complete absence of accountability is bred. Part of the motivation of these conversations is to think about what they mean today as well, and also how we can imagine these rights in the future. I want to give that as much time as we can, but I do have one last question about how we articulate this right to life and security.

Leilani, how could we apply this right? You spoke a little bit about housing, but I want to go beyond that, to other slow processes that might lead to death, like poverty or hunger, you know, cutting off income assistance or even climate change. I mean, you can pick one of those and talk about that. And do it in less than two minutes.

Okay. It's a big question. But where else can we take this? How else can we think about it? Yeah. No, I mean, there are advocates around the world who are trying to have it recognized that those conditions, those material conditions of deprivation, absolutely, whether it's poverty, a lack of housing,

lack of access to clean water, lack of access to food, that those are violations of the right to life. So what we need is for states to start realizing that that's the terrain they're in and they I mean they go off to court and they argue against this stuff in this country they say we are not required to do anything to promote the right to life we don't have to have a robust welfare system we don't have to ensure adequate housing for everybody that's not what the right to life entails. They want this very narrow view of the right to life. So who do

they want the right to life to apply to? Or who don't they want it to apply to? They don't want it to apply to Indigenous peoples who do not have potable water and who are disproportionately represented in homeless populations. They don't want it to apply to persons with disabilities who are disproportionately represented in homeless populations. They don't want it to apply to black and brown people, refugees and migrants. So is that the Canada we wanna live in?

No, I don't. Aziza, can you tackle the same question but specifically on climate change? Like, where does the right to life, liberty and security fit into this world that is changing and that we are all going to be suffering the results of? ecological devastation, extractivism, exploitation, we would need to fundamentally reshape our idea of rights from human rights to beyond human rights to encompass all of those creatures with whom we share this earth and with whom our lives and our survival are so intimately intertwined. We are fortunate in this respect that there are so many other intellectual,

legal, political traditions that we can draw on even if they have been persistently erased by colonial systems of knowledge and power, what scholars of settler colonialism call epistemicide, the destruction of systems of knowledge. I feel so grateful for all that I've learned from indigenous scholars, which have also inspired me to examine and learn about different facets of the tradition that I myself come from, Islamic tradition. For example, the fact that in both indigenous and Islamic legal traditions, non-human animals going back centuries were accorded rights, rights that seem unimaginable to us today and that fundamentally challenge this teleological idea that we have of history, that we progress throughout time and we give more and more rights to more and more people and more and more beings. From the seventh century, Islamic legal

scholars recognized for non-human animals a right to quench their thirst, a right to water, which is so subversive from our current perspectives, in which not only do we not have rights for non-human animals, but we don't even have an enforced right for water in international law. It's also important for us to note that rights do not capture the entirety of how we should think about our relationships with and obligations to each other. Another thing I'm grateful to Indigenous scholars for is for reminding us of the political principle of love. So often, especially under colonial frameworks, love is completely depoliticized and restricted to the interpersonal realm of romantic love or maybe friendship, family love, as opposed to being a key political principle that guides how we organize all our relationships with each other on this land, human and other than human. Anishinaabe scholar, legal scholar, John Burroughs, very eminent legal

scholar, John Burroughs, points out that the word for love in Anishinaabe Moen, the Anishinaabe language, shares a similar root to the word for river. And like a river, love flows and nourishes everything around it, everything that it touches. And so this reminds us that as in a riverine ecology, we are all bound with each other and in ways that exceed just the bare obligations that we owe to each other due to rights and that instead of thinking of our interdependence as a source of weakness and frailty and vulnerability, we should rather honour it

as a source of our strength. That's a beautiful thought. Go ahead, Cindy. Yeah, I think that deserves a applause. It's a really beautiful thought. Cindy, one more thought on this and then we're going to wrap it up after that. Yeah, I just think this interconnectedness really reminds us that the importance of thinking about security is because we live in a condition of insecurity, constant insecurity. And that insecurity is defined above all else by our climate crisis. And so you may be familiar with this idea that we live in the Anthropocene, right, of

human-made change in the world. But there's also the idea that we're living in the petrosene, by which more than 80% of our global economy is still funded by fossil fuels, in which case our insecurity is tied not only to one another by, you know, in the United States, where I'm from, we're still debating, like, the rights of the corporation to access natural resources rather than thinking about the environmental effects

and the devastation on the environment and the climate created by the petrosene that we live in. And so just to echo your point that the climate crisis really highlights that we just live in this condition of insecurity more than the possibilities of maintaining human security. We've really, I mean, we can only scratch the surface in these conversations. It's deeply frustrating. And so we're dancing from one topic to the next, all of which could, you'd have PhD

theses written about. But I do want to ask another tough question to end off this discussion. And Leilani, I'd like to start with you. It's just, if you, just one idea, if you had a magic wand and if it were possible to rewrite Article 3, what would be the one thing you would change or add or take away? What would you do? Is it unfair to go back to love? Let's stay with love. Let's stay with love. I was so moved by what you said Aziza about love and I was just thinking about imagine if love was really allowed to flourish and meander like a river. I immediately drawn to images of

families in Gaza, image after image of heartbroken mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and just thinking like they're not in fact people in Gaza Palestinians in Gaza are not even being allowed to love it's a it's a little bit overwhelming so I just wanted to put that out there it's so you would add no no that was not in answer to your question in answer to your question. In answer to your question, I suppose if I was going to take a legal kick at the can, I think that more fulsome understanding of, you know, that we are all gen genuinely we are all human beings all entitled to the right to life and that that requires certain material conditions. Yeah.

Aziz, that same question. Sometimes I think it's lawyers where we pay too much attention to words and the texts of things. I don't think this is a text problem. I think this is a world problem. It's a problem with the context within which the text is applied, the profound absence and vitiation of institutions of accountability to actually apply the text as it is written, the profound disparities in power that continue to reinscribe the line between those whose lives matter versus

those whose lives are relegated to what eminent anthropologist Hassan Hajj referred to as colonial, rubbishing those who are treated as waste to be discarded. So I don't think it's a question of rewriting the UDHR, but rather a question of remaking the world to create a condition within which the UDHR could have meaning and life. Cindy, how would you answer the question? Yeah, I think my concern would be taking the institutions that we have, because it's easy to think about rewriting everything and starting over from scratch.

But whenever you think you're starting over from scratch, I'm going to borrow a point that Aziza made, and you think you've starting over from scratch, I'm going to borrow a point that Aziza made, and you think you've arrived at a terra nullis, you haven't. There are people there, there are lives there, there are communities there that are being written over. And so what do we do with the system we have, and how do we make it better rather than allowing ourselves to entertain the possibility of starting over?

Because I think that's a dangerous way of thinking. How can we wipe everything clean to make something new? allowing ourselves to entertain the possibility of starting over, because I think that's a dangerous way of thinking. How can we wipe everything clean to make something new? That kind of language has been used in history before. It's a great effect. And so when we think about the EHR, and maybe its remoteness from us, I'm more interested in how do we find resources

to build greater solidarity, and how do we build greater access to the institutions we have. The continued denial of statehood to Palestine, for example, is a clear indication that the system is not willing to be inclusive, that there are states in the world, governments in waiting. There's a new book called States in Waiting that looks at these denied nations that are seeking to be recognized by the world but aren't. How do we recognize one another? And yeah, maybe it's a reminder that we practice this every day in our intimate relations. But how do we do this on a broader policy

scale and think about recognition in a more inclusive way than we have to this point? There's so much hopelessness. You know, we seem to be in a more inclusive way than we have to this point. There is so much hopelessness. You know, we seem to be in a moment of crisis for human rights and international law, where people are questioning whether international law can even be fit for purpose for the 21st century. How do each of you reckon with that question? Maybe starting with you, Leilani,

and then going, all three of you. Well, you assume I'm coping. My partner's in the audience, you can ask him. What's happened in Gaza has been a huge wake up for me. I have worked in the occupied Palestinian territory since 1994, and yet what's happened in Gaza has completely altered my being and is causing me a real reckoning. I mean remember I was a UN mechanism myself.

I obviously, I'm an international human rights lawyer. I put a lot of stock in international law and the system and now I feel it's completely corrupted. And I should have known all along. I mean, it's honestly, many of us who are in similar positions to me, we're really struggling. Like, what is the meaning of all this? What is the meaning of my entire career and my efforts to bring rights to people to bear, right? It's a real existential moment for me.

Okay. Aziza and then Cindy. I'm also, I'm not coping. I don't really know anyone who's coping. The last nine months have been devastating. Part of what makes it so difficult is the constant gaslighting that we are constantly confronted with, that the very people who are perpetrating and enabling the most horrific atrocities continue to be treated as the real experts on law and politics, whereas those who have been speaking out against them for decades precisely because they have been speaking out against them for decades, precisely because they have been speaking out, are represented as radical and extremists and therefore disregarded as voices to be listened to.

And this isn't only on Gaza, it predates Gaza. The Canadian Senate held hearings on Islamophobia recently where they refused to invite to testify any of those who have endured and survived the tortures and entrapment and extreme detention policies of the quote unquote war on terror that because it's the paradox is that by being targeted by security measures, you get represented as a security threat and therefore not worth listening to. And in fact, that it's a, it's a danger to even give you a platform. And so I want to just end by saying thank you. Thank you to everyone for creating this forum,

because what good is a right if we are deprived of not even the most basic means to uphold it, but to even articulate it in the face of ongoing persistent violation. So thank you. Thanks for being here. And we'll do a formal thank you in a moment. But I do want to hear from Cindy, but also and I to complicate things, if you can keep in your mind this question, because it is also related. Is there's one thing you can point to that we can learn from the struggle over the

right to life, liberty and security in all its forms over all these years, and there have been so many different ways of doing so about what it means to achieve justice today. I think one lesson is that, and a theme we've raised many times already, is that global south peoples thought it was important and they fought for them. And so in cynicism, it's easy to dismiss the system, the corruption, and to say we need to start over. But in fact, when you do that, you create a vacuum. And to whom do you leave these powerful institutions? And so I think it's really important to stay well informed. I actually want to leave on a note of hope, because I think the 63 days that took place at the University of Toronto

were a real sign of a willingness to make oneself vulnerable, to ask hard questions by the students. I think when you look in history, students are often not wrong and they are the first front of raising issues, the outcry that we need to hear, but even alongside those outcries, there are things we can do. And so participating doesn't always mean marching. There are other ways that we can build a better world together. And so I think it's really important to fight the cynicism

and the tendency to disengage or to dismiss and to leave what still remains very powerful instruments to the wrong people. Cindy, Aziza and Leilani, thank you so much for your insights. Really, really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. On Ideas, you've been listening to the Right to Security. It's the first part of our series, Brave New Worlds, recorded at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Ideas at Stratford is produced by Philip Coulter

and Pauline Holdsworth. (*audience applauding*) Special thanks to Julie Miles, Gregory McLaughlin, Renata Hanson, Harper Charlton, James Hyatt, Mira Henderson, Kendalyn Bishop, Madeline Grogan and the entire Stratford Festival team. At Ideas, technical production by Danielle Duval, our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, senior producer Nikola Lukcic, Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. And I'm so grateful you are all here today.

Thank you so much for coming and see you for the rest of the week, I hope. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. President, I believe the present Declaration of Human Rights is a document of the first order of importance. While history alone can determine the historic significance of an event, it is safe to say that the declaration before us may be destined to occupy an honorable place in the procession of positive landmarks in human history.