...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Arbour on Canadian “rights”: Louise Arbour’s less than brilliant career at the helm of the OIC-steered UN HRC was presaged by these words she spoke back in 2005. Hindsight affording us flawless vision, we can see that Arbour was a clueless “human rights” type back then, and thus didn’t stand a chance when she leapt onto the public stage. From Maclean’s (my bolds):

…In our more recent history, the adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 held the potential to change the relationship among executive, legislature and judiciary, opening up the possibility for an articulation of the rights-based component of public policy decisions. Section 7, guaranteeing the right "to life, liberty and security of the person," is particularly relevant in the context of the UN declaration's "freedom from want." Political scientists and legal scholars watched the courts to see what would be the impact of judicial review on public policy decisions.

The first two decades of Charter litigation testify to a certain timidity -- both on the part of litigants and the courts -- to tackle head-on the claims emerging from the right to be free from want. Canadian courts have championed civil and political rights and have articulated for themselves an appropriately far-reaching sphere of judicial review when the state invokes the use of repressive criminal law powers. But considerably more reticence has been expressed in relation to social, economic and cultural rights and the protection of vulnerable segments of the population on grounds other than discrimination.

Courts the world over have been playing an increasingly vital role in enforcing socio-economic rights, bringing them from the realms of charity to the reach of justice. Allegations as to the uniformly and uniquely "costly" nature of socio-economic rights obligations seem at best strange or misinformed, or at worst, disingenuous, set against these realities. Furthermore, the legality of judicial review of all human rights is not open to question under the Canadian constitutional system. Courts are well-equipped to reflect the entrenched expectation of Canadians that equitable access to the riches generated by our collective harvesting of this generous land is no longer a matter of charitable disposition.

The possibility for people to claim their human rights entitlements through legal processes is essential so that human rights have meaning for those most at the margins. There will always be a place for charity, but charitable responses are not an effective, principled or sustainable substitute for enforceable human rights guarantees.

The debate in Canada on these issues can be certain to continue. However, those fearing or objecting to the vision of human rights that I've outlined would do well to bring the true nature of their misgivings into the open, out from the shadows of straw men and calculated obfuscation. With good faith engagement on the substantive issues, I believe that there will be every prospect of a more just, inclusive and rights-respecting democracy in Canada in years to come.

Well, those “misgivings” have certainly come to the fore recently, although probably not in the way Arbour and the other “human rights” wonks either intended or desired. And now that the calculated obfuscation/semi-crypto Marxism of the HRCs and their boosters (like Arbour, with her stated desire to “harvest” Canadian “riches” by getting the courts to redistribute them in a more “equitable” fashion) has been dispelled by blasts of outrage from clear-thinkers like Steyn and Levant, there’s no going back to our former ignorance and complacency.

Posted by: scaramouche at 09:49 | link | comments

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