Le doctorant Pierre-Alexandre Cardinal et la candidate au BCL/LLB Bianca Braganza contribuent au blogue du CHRLP; le candidat au BCL/LLB Balarama Holness participe à des consultations sur la discrimination systémique; Jeremy Pizzi écrit sur la Cour internationale de justice et la cause des Rohingyas, tandis que le boursier O’Brien en résidence Arafat Khan blogue sur les droit des femmes en Inde et au Bangladesh; et finalement la doctorante Jo Murray blogue sur le bien-être chez les doctorants.

On Global Human Rights — Part Two

Pierre-Alexandre Cardinal, DCL candidate, CHRLP Blog, 5 November 2019

In this second piece of a two-part series, Pierre-Alexandre Cardinal proposes a pathway to the global reality of Human Rights, a form of de-centred and evolutive design grounded in the lived experiences of “peoples in struggle and communities in resistance.” Continue reading…

Montreal’s bureaucracy perpetuates discrimination, groups tell racism hearing

Paul Cherry, Montreal Gazette, 4 November 2019

The two first leaders of groups to speak before the city’s public consultation on systemic racism and discrimination Monday night might have come to it with very different points of view, but they both shared the same opinion. “It’s been a long time coming,” said [BCL/LLB candidate] Balarama Holness of Montreal en Action, the group that collected the 22,000 signatures on a petition that forced the consultation process.

Holness, a McGill University law student, also called on the city to create more sports, leisure and recreation programs in parts of the city like Montreal North, where young visible minorities are much more likely to get arrested by the Montreal police than white people. “Sports saved me,” said the former Montreal Alouette. Continue reading…

The ICC’s Investigation Problem and Safeguarding Justice for the Rohingya

Jeremy Pizzi, BCL/LLB candidate, PKI Global Justice Journal, 31 October 2019

As of the date of writing, Pre-Trial Chamber III of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is preparing to decide whether the Situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar is to become the Office of the Prosecutor’s (OTP) twelfth ongoing investigation going into 2020 (ICC Proposed Budget 2020, at para 107). As the OTP’s investigatory case load continues to increase, it seems natural to review whether it has the necessary capacity to deal with this increase in workload. Continue reading…

Pluralism in Women’s Property and Inheritance Rights – Challenges for realizing human rights in Bangladesh and India

Arafat Hosen Khan, O’Brien Fellow in Residence, CHRLP Blog, 11 October 2019

Although women contribute immensely to all sectors of development, pluralism risks affecting their core human rights and access to land and inheritance. In many developing countries, especially in Bangladesh and India, the laws ensuring women’s property and inheritance rights have proven largely ineffective in promoting their positions. Continue reading…

Reinventing the Wellness Wheel: DCL Retreat 2019

Jo Murray, DCL candidate, Jurists’ Diction Blog, 10 October 2019

Last week (Wednesday October 2nd) was the annual DCL Retreat. The DCL Retreat is a full-day conference in which all McGill DCL students take the time to come together and discuss the process, challenges, joys, of the DCL. The Retreat is a real-life enactment of what this blog is attempting to do. It is a space to share our individual DCL experiences with our community; it encourages dialogue and learning. The panels aim to provide us with skills and resources to grow. Continue reading…

Reclaiming Universal Human Rights for Gender-Based Violence in a Plural Global Order: Opportunities and Challenges

Bianca Braganza, BCL/LLB candidate, CHRLP Blog, 9 October 2019

Reclaiming human rights in a plural global order is a complex endeavor. It requires Western hegemonic ideas of what “human rights” be critically analyzed for their implementation in non-Western contexts. One might say there is a tendency to impose outcome-based approaches, such as those purported by international agencies in the case of gender equality for example, without sufficient consideration to cultural, historic and colonial factors that produce these given outcomes. In that sense, is a universal conception of ‘human rights’ even achievable in a world that is fraught with different context-contingent normative paradigms of the way things should be? Continue reading…