{"id":35941,"date":"2020-12-18T03:59:42","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T11:59:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=35941"},"modified":"2020-12-16T18:21:06","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T02:21:06","slug":"justice-slams-the-un","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2020\/12\/18\/justice-slams-the-un\/","title":{"rendered":"Justice slams the UN"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Dec. 9, the Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, delivered the inaugural Elie Wiesel Lectureship in Human Rights. (photo by Philippe Landreville)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, last week delivered an emotional, scathing indictment of the world\u2019s failures to live up to the promise of post-Holocaust human rights protections.<\/p>\n

Abella, a daughter of Holocaust survivors who herself was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany, in 1946, delivered the inaugural Elie Wiesel Lectureship in Human Rights. She spoke Dec. 9 on the 72nd anniversary of the United Nations\u2019 adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the day before the 72nd anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The promise of those documents \u2013 and the justice represented by the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals \u2013 has been betrayed and ignored, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese were the powerful legal symbols of a world shamefully chastened,\u201d Abella said in the streamed virtual presentation. \u201cBut although Nuremberg represented a sincere commitment to justice, it was a commitment all too fleeting.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the West\u2019s triumph over fascism gave way to conflict with communism, Germany transformed in the diplomatic imagination from an enemy conquered to a potential ally to be wooed, she said. Britain issued a communiqu\u00e9 to all Commonwealth countries to abandon prosecutions of Nazi war criminals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe past was tucked away and the moral comfort of the Nuremberg trials gave way to the moral expedient of the Cold War,\u201d Abella said.<\/p>\n

As the fight against communism eclipsed the fight for justice over past crimes, expedience led Western countries to welcome Nazi scientists and others to contribute to the military-industrial strategy \u2013 even as Jewish victims of Nazism, like Abella and her parents, sat stateless in DP camps.<\/p>\n

To Abella, Nuremberg represented an acknowledgement of the failure of Western democracies to respond when they should have and could have.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so, the vitriolic language and venal rights abuses unrestrained by anyone\u2019s conscience anywhere in or out of Germany turned into the ultimate rights abuse: genocide,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Some justice did in fact emerge in the aftermath of Nuremberg and remarkable progress has been made in some quarters, she said. \u201cBut we still have not learned the most important lesson of all \u2013 to try to prevent the abuses in the first place. All over the world, in the name of religion, domestic sovereignty, national interest, economic exigency or sheer arrogance, men, women and children are being slaughtered, abused, imprisoned, terrorized and exploited with impunity.\u2026 No national abuser seems to worry whether there will be a Nuremberg trial later because usually there isn\u2019t. And, in any event, by the time there is, all the damage that was sought to be done has been done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abella reflected on the preoccupation among jurists with the rule of law, noting that the atrocities of the Nazi era all took place legally under German laws. She said we should be focused on \u201cthe rule of justice, not just the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Itemizing the myriad genocides that have occurred since 1945, including ones happening now, Abella decried a lack of global will to confront atrocities before they occur.<\/p>\n

\u201cClearly what remains elusive is our willingness as an international community to protect humanity from injustice,\u201d she said, launching a broadside against the failures of the United Nations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can hardly be said to have been the avatar of human rights we hoped it would be when it was created,\u201d she said. \u201cWe changed the world\u2019s institutions and laws after World War II because they had lost their legitimacy and integrity. Are we there again? Not so much because our human rights laws need changing, but because a good argument can be made that our existing global institutions, and especially the UN\u2019s deliberative role, are playing fast and loose with their legitimacy and our integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

She acknowledged the successes of some UN agencies, such as UNICEF, but lamented the body\u2019s failures to meet its core objectives.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe UN had four objectives: to protect future generations from war, to guard human rights, to foster universal justice and to promote social progress,\u201d she said. \u201cSince then, 40 million people have died as a result of conflicts all over the world. The UN eventually reacted in Libya and wagged its finger at Syria, but I waited in vain to wait to hear what it had to say about Iran, Venezuela and China, for example. Isn\u2019t that magisterial silence a thunderous answer to those who say things would be a lot worse without the UN? Worse how? I know it\u2019s all we have but does that mean it\u2019s the best we can do? Nations debate, people die. Nations dissemble, people die. Nations defy, people die. We need more than the words and laws of justice. We need justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abella acknowledged the need to address climate change but suggested a moral climate crisis is upon us.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to worry not only about how the climate is changing the world but how the moral climate is creating an atmosphere polluted by bombastic anti-intellectualism, sanctimonious incivility and a moral free-for-all,\u201d she said. \u201cEveryone is talking and no one is listening. We are rolling back hard-fought human rights for minorities, immigrants, refugees, workers and women.<\/p>\n

Abella approached global justice through the eyes of a single family. Her parents were married in Poland on Sept. 3, 1939, the day the Nazis rolled over the border and as the Second World War began. Her parents spent four years in concentration camps. The brother she never knew was murdered at the age of two-and-a-half. The only survivors of her extended family were her parents and one grandmother.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, no justice,\u201d she said, struggling to maintain her composure. \u201cNo one with this history does not feel lucky to be alive and free. No one with this history takes anything for granted and no one with this history does not feel that those of us who are alive have a duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents, a world where all children regardless of race, colour, religion or gender can wear their identities with dignity, with pride and in peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her own existence is a statement of the resilience of human hopefulness, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an act that seems to me to be almost incomprehensible in its breathtaking optimism, my parents and thousands of other survivors transcended the inhumanity they had experienced and decided to have more children,\u201d she said. \u201cI think it was a way to fix their hearts and prove to themselves and the world that their spirits were not broken.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abella dedicated her lecture not only to Elie Wiesel, the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but also to Irwin Cotler, who introduced her prior to her presentation and who Abella called Wiesel\u2019s \u201cspiritual heir.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister, is the founder and chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, which sponsored the lecture along with faculties of law at McGill University and the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, the Lord Reading Law Society and the International Bar Association\u2019s Human Rights Institute.<\/p>\n

Cotler, who last month was appointed Canada\u2019s special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, noted that Abella was the youngest person ever appointed to the Canadian judiciary, at age 29.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was the first refugee ever appointed to the judiciary and she was the first Jewish woman ever appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada,\u201d Cotler said, noting that he was the justice minister who nominated her to the highest court. \u201cShe has been a remarkable trailblazer. A quintessential Renaissance jurist, public intellectual, educator and judge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among Abella\u2019s recognitions, Cotler noted, are 39 honorary doctorates.<\/p>\n

To watch the lecture, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Dec. 9, the Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, delivered the inaugural Elie Wiesel Lectureship in Human Rights. (photo by Philippe Landreville) The Honourable Rosalie Silberman Abella, a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, last week delivered an emotional, scathing indictment of the world\u2019s failures to live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3097,2791,53,1122,5371,20137,7203,2893,2129,228],"class_list":["post-35941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national","tag-elie-wiesel","tag-genocide","tag-holocaust","tag-human-rights","tag-justice","tag-raoul-wallenberg-centre","tag-rosalie-silberman-abella","tag-survivors","tag-un","tag-united-nations"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}