Representation and suspicion in Canada's appearance under the Universal Periodic Review

Introduction In an acerbic concluding comment on Canada�s first appearance under the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the Cuban delegation reflected on what it saw as the decline of Canada�s dedication to the global good. Cuba indicated that it �missed� Canada�s former �pro-third-world approach� and a national stance that was �always on the side of the weakest�. It also lamented that Canada no longer held its former commitment �to the noblest causes�. Given the circumstances in which they were made (as a reflection on the UPR and in the UN Human Rights Council), these comments read as an accusation by Cuba that Canada, presented as once having been a champion of social justice and human rights, no longer warrants such a characterisation. The idea that Canada is (or was) a champion of rights has had broad circulation and considerable international currency in the past half-century, currency that has been given further value through Canada�s early involvement in global peace-keeping and the award of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize to former Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs (and future Prime Minister) Lester B. Pearson. More recent examples of Canada�s work in promoting human rights ideas can be seen in its sponsorship of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which produced The Responsibility to Protect report (2001), or its role in circulating �non-papers� suggesting new human rights reporting procedures for what ultimately became the Universal Periodic Review

\u27What had been many became one\u27: continuity, the common law, and Crisis on Infinite Earths

We don’t usually think that lawyers and comic book readers have much in common. Certainly, unflattering representations and stereotypes of each abound. Less obviously, perhaps, each also has a disciplinary veneration of the accumulation of textual knowledge and of often obscure narrative detail. For the contemporary comic book reader, there are voluminous collections of past stories, reprinted in hardcover, paperback, and digitally. Taken together, these offer a rich body of fictional work to be consumed for its own sake, as well as to enhance the enjoyment of new stories printed in hundreds of monthly titles. For lawyers, the corpus of case law, an archive whose mastery is one of the ostensible aims of legal training in common law jurisdictions, acts in a similar fashion, having meaning itself as well as giving legal consequence and context to the matter in dispute

A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada

With the passage into law of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, rights took on new legal, political, and social significance in Canada. In the decades following, Canadian jurisprudence has emphasised the importance of rights, determining their shape and asserting their centrality to legal ideas about what Canada represents. At the same time, an increasing number of Canadian novels have also engaged with the language of human rights and civil liberties, reflecting, like their counterparts in law, the possibilities of rights and the failure of their protection. In A Culture of Rights, Benjamin Authers reads novels by authors including Joy Kogawa, Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Jeanette Armstrong alongside legal texts and key constitutional rights cases, arguing for the need for a more complex, interdisciplinary understanding of the sources of rights in Canada and elsewhere. He suggests that, at present, even when rights are violated, popular insistence on Canada’s rights-driven society remains. Despite the limited scope of our rights, and the deferral of more substantive rights protections to some projected, ideal Canada, we remain keen to promote ourselves as members of an entirely just society.This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an Ontario government agency

"An Insane and Irresponsible Government": Louis Riel and the Representation of Responsibility

This chapter examines the language of responsibility and insanity deployed in Louis Riel�s �case� and considers how representation of Riel�s mental state came to illustrate disparate form of �responsibility knowledge�

'What had been many became one': continuity, thecommon law, and Crisis on Infinite Earths

We don�t usually think that lawyers and comic book readers have much in common. Certainly, unflattering representations and stereotypes of each abound. Less obviously, perhaps, each also has a disciplinary veneration of the accumulation of textual knowledge and of often obscure narrative detail. For the contemporary comic book reader, there are voluminous collections of past stories, reprinted in hardcover, paperback, and digitally. Taken together, these offer a rich body of fictional work to be consumed for its own sake, as well as to enhance the enjoyment of new stories printed in hundreds of monthly titles. For lawyers, the corpus of case law, an archive whose mastery is one of the ostensible aims of legal training in common law jurisdictions, acts in a similar fashion, having meaning itself as well as giving legal consequence and context to the matter in dispute

Introduction: Human rights, interdisciplinarity, and the time of utopia

This article explores the relationship between human rights and utopian thinking through three recurrent tropes: interdisciplinarity, time and the promise. Utopia, like human rights, is shaped by its interdisciplinary engagement with multiple fields of knowledge, by its invocation of the past, present and future as ways of addressing contemporary problems, and by a promissory language, often unfulfilled, of social change and betterment. These interconnected ideas suggest that an attention to the dialogue between utopian thought and human rights can open up new conceptual possibilities, even as those possibilities often fail, or are themselves partial.This research was supported by an Aus tralian Research Council Laureate Fellowship Grant (FL100100176)