T
he Honourable Rosalie Abella of the Supreme Court of Canada and formerly of the Ontario Court of Appeal, was the 2004 recipient of the Walter S. Tarnopolsky Award for her outstanding contributions to the field of human rights. The Award was presented at the joint ICJ Canada/ Canadian Judges’ Forum meeting at the CBA Annual Conference in Winnipeg in August by the Honourable Ian Binnie, also of the Supreme Court and an ICJ Commissioner. Justice Abella, who was a close personal friend of Walter Tarnopolsky, has been a longtime supporter of ICJ Canada and a member of Council since 1982.

Following her introduction by the Honourable Constance Glube, Chief Justice of Nova Scotia, Justice Abella delivered an impassioned and moving address to the ICJ Annual Meeting.

She began by calling attention to the many groundbreaking achievements of

Canadian jurists in the fields of human rights, equality rights, and social justice and to the real advances made in these areas by Canada generally in the past 50 years. But her focus was not on the past but the present, on international indifference to the alarming rise and persistence of large-scale global injustices in
the past decade that have occurred despite the lessons of the Nuremberg trials and the resulting proliferation of international laws, treaties and conventions designed to put an end to human rights abuses forever.

“We have been far too timid as an international community,” she said, “about insisting on the centrality of human rights enforcement as a civilizing, global requirement. It is not just about having the right laws; it is about having and enforcing them. It is not just what you stand for; it is what you stand up for.”

How did it happen, she asked, with all our international laws to protect human rights, that the international community was able to ignore the evidence of incipient and then actual genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Congo; gross violations of the rule of law and judicial independence in Zimbabwe, Colombia, and
Indonesia; widespread targeted human rights abuses in Sudan, Chechnya, and Afghanistan? The answer: “Indifference is injustice's incubator…we felt entitled somehow to defer consideration of our international moral obligations, and hide behind contraceptive terminology like ‘domestic sovereignty’ or ‘cultural relativism.’”

Setting her own perspective as a child of Holocaust survivors against the twin horrors of events in Darfur and the world's “astonishingly aenemic” response to them, Justice Abella made a
compelling case for proactive international responses to such international crises.

“We have still not learned the most important lesson of all — to try to prevent the abuses in the first place. We have not finished connecting history's dots. All over the world, in the name of religion, national interest, economic exigency, or sheer arrogance, men, women, and children are being murdered,
abused, imprisoned, terrorized, and exploited. With impunity.

“We have no international mechanism to prevent the ongoing slaughter of children and other innocent civilians, and no overriding sense of moral responsibility that informs the international community
and helps develop a consensus for when responsive multilateral military action is required to protect rights and freedoms. We have, in fact, no consensus on what our international moral responsibilities are period, and that is why we are so desperately lacking in enforcement mechanisms, legal and otherwise.

“Almost 60 years after the Nuremberg trials, we still have not developed an international moral culture which will not tolerate intolerance. Nations debate; people die. Nations dissemble; people die. Nations defy; people die.

“Where injustice is preventable, it should be prevented when first identified, not permitted first to create its human devastation before being held to account.”

Not surprisingly, Justice Abella received a standing ovation from all those present.

The full text of Justice Abella’s address is available online at www.icjcanada.org. A hard copy may also be obtained by calling the ICJ office in Ottawa.