Speaking truth to power

As HIV/AIDS rips apart the populations of sub-Saharan Africa – where more than 17 million people have died from the disease – startling “secondary” effects of the pandemic are coming to light.

Among them is the plight of women and children. More than 12 million children have been orphaned by AIDS. And African women now make up the majority of those contracting the disease.

One piece of this tragedy is that in these societies, women and orphaned children have virtually no legal rights.

With this in mind, Stephen Lewis, United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, turned to former Faculty of Law Dean Ron Daniels and Noah Novogrodsky, director of the school’s international human rights program, who established a course.

“Now 21 students at U of T are conducting legal research into the problems of development and of human rights raised by the AIDS crisis,” says Novogrodsky.

The course is only one of Novogrodsky’s endeavours in the human rights arena. In 2003, he launched the first international human rights legal clinic in Canada, which provides 14 upper-year law students with an opportunity to work on cases ranging from a land claim for Mayan indigenous groups in Belize to writing a brief for the war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone on the illegality of child soldiers.

Novogrodsky and students Rahat Godil, Ivana Djordjevic and Lucas Lung realized a major achievement in December 2004, when they appeared before the Supreme Court of Canada as an intervener in the appeal, Mugesera v. Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Leon Mugesera is accused of inciting genocide in Rwanda. For nine years, Canadian officials have been attempting to deport him. The law firm Goodmans LLP supported the U of T team in the case, which is pending.

“Mugesera came to Canada before the worst killing in Rwanda, but he had urged the extermination of Tutsis. Our position was that the crime of incitement to genocide had not been defined in Canadian law before, but had been in the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda. We were saying that Canada should not be a safe haven for war criminals and that inciting genocide means that this person is deportable as a war criminal.”

Novogrodsky sees the benefits of this work as threefold.

“We have many famous Canadians in the field of international human rights, such as Stephen Lewis and (United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights) Louise Arbour. I want to train the next generation of great Canadian human rights advocates.”

The U of T team is also developing important new research in this emerging field.

“In Belize, our students are finding that many people are being dispossessed from lands that they have been farming for generations. So we are fighting to reflect the community’s wishes in the courts of Belize. This knowledge can be applied in aboriginal land claims issues around the world.”

Novogrodsky also feels the clinic provides public service.

“People in the developing world want somebody who can speak truth to power. They want to know that a life in Africa is as valuable as a life in Toronto. We’re saying that human rights abuses are wrong wherever they occur and that we can, through the development of law, make a difference.”