CANADA:Security measures in the "post 9/11" years have contributed to a backlash against human rights and equality issues, according to Canadian law professor and international human rights expert Kathleen Mahoney, writes Lorna Siggins, Western Correspondent.
In Canada's case, about "25 years of gains" have been lost, as all areas of human rights have been "sacrificed to the 'higher' right of security", she said on Saturday. Prof Mahoney, keynote speaker at an NUI Galway conference on equality, law and the Constitution, said that equality issues had undoubtedly also been affected. In her view, "9/11 could be the Darth Vador factor" which was never expressly stated in court judgments.
Canada's chief justice had defined equality as the "most difficult right", but when the Canadian charter of rights and freedoms was passed into law in 1982, it constitutionalised the "most wide-ranging equality provisions in the world", she said.
In the current political climate, she was concerned about a loss of vision in relation to section 15 of the charter. This section defines every individual as equal before the law and under the law, with the right to equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination, based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.
An attempt by the Canadian supreme court to bring clarity to section 15 in 1998 by using the standards of human dignity had not helped, Prof Mahoney said. The rationale of human dignity was "so malleable" that it could be used in a very positive or a very negative way, and could allow subconscious biases to influence judgments.
Prof Mahoney, who has been decorated for her research, practice, and activism on internationally critical human rights issues, is a mother of five children and has been a professor at the University of Calgary for 25 years.
Three years ago she wrote a report examining the Canadian government's response to the claims of Aboriginal residential school survivors.
During the research for this, she visited Ireland to study this State's response to abuse victims who had been resident in industrial schools. On her recommendation as chief negotiator, every survivor of an industrial school in Canada has been allocated reparations.