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While her name echoes across the pages of legal and constitutional history, we also remember the informal [Trish]. At home, that warm and welcoming place, where the door was always open, and the only rule was make yourself at home. Where her splendid children, Brandon, Mike, Kate and Jack displayed their achievements on the wall of honour, and brought their friends to hang out, share Trish's delicious cooking, and strategize over upcoming sports competitions, and projects. Where other children became her children and where they found a loving, safe and supportive home. Where Trish's favourite coffee was always on offer. We remember her on the road, meeting her on the road, travelling with other women and their children, putting human rights into action in Saskatchewan prisons, seeking justice, or watching with great pride and enormous knowledge the kids' activities at powwows, hockey and lacrosse arenas, soccer fields, or concert halls. We remember her scheming and "schmoking," laughing, and cooking up new ways to thwart the colonizer or defeat the machinations of injustice. This is not to say that Trish avoided the world of policy-making. To the contrary. A key member of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women in the early 1 990s, she ensured that the voices of Indigenous women were central to the process. Her guidance strongly influenced the Task Force final report and the subsequent establishment of the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge for Aboriginal women. Trish was a vital expert witness at the Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women in Kingston (the Arbour Commission), which investigated the unlawful stripping and shackling of women, imposition on women of lengthy segregation, and their involuntary movement to a men's prison. Nor did her contribution end with the completion of the Task Force and Commission. Trish did not hesitate to bring attention to government shortcomings in realizing the vision of the Task Force and the Arbour inquiry. She was one of the staunchest critics of Correctional Services' divergence from the original inspiration for the Healing Lodge. She worked with the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies and was a trusted advisor and friend to Kim Pate, when they launched a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission against the Government of Canada on behalf of all women serving two years or more. Supported by 27 national and international women's, Aboriginal, and social justice groups, the complaint called for a systemic review and remedy for the discriminatory treatment of women in prisons and the criminal justice system generally.

On 7 August 2008, long-standing tensions in the Caucasus region came to a head when President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia ordered troops into the de facto independent region of South Ossetia with a view to reestablishing Georgian sovereignty. This intervention, which included the shelling and occupation of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, was the culmination of a number of more minor military exchanges over the proceeding months. South Ossetia’s sponsor, the Russian Federation, responded swiftly to the Georgian action, with a large-scale military intervention into the state of Georgia. This use of force ultimately went beyond the boundaries of the South Ossetia region, both into the comparable breakaway region of Abkhazia and further into ‘Georgia proper’.

The regulations in Alberta dealing with driver’s licenses were amended in 2003 to require that all license holders be photographed. The license holder’s photo would appear on his or her license and be included in a facial recognition data bank maintained by the province. Prior to this change, the regulations had permitted the Registrar of Motor Vehicles to grant an exemption to an individual who, for religious reasons, objected to having her or his photo taken. Members of the Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony, who believe that the Second Commandment prohibits the making of photographic images, had been exempted from the photo requirement under old regulations, but were required under the new law to be photographed before a license would be issued.

In June 2008, I was asked by the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC) to write a report about the regulation of hate speech on the internet, focusing specifically on s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA). Section 13 prohibits the repeated communication on the phone system or the internet of any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt by reason of the fact that that person or those persons are identifiable on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination such as race, gender, or religion.

During the last few years there has been a disinformation campaign against human rights commissions. While it is not surprising that Internet blogs post things about HRCs that are false and malicious, these claims have seeped into mainstream discourse. This paper sets out some of the claims made about the CHRC and describes how they are misleading or just plain false and it considers how these deceptive and invented claims have entered mainstream discourse. This will involve some general observations about the state of public discourse in Canada.

This paper summarizes the recommendations made in the report I prepared for the Canadian Human Rights Commission concerning s.13 of the CHRA. In the report I recommended the repeal of the section so that the CHRC and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal would no longer deal with hate speech, and in particular hate speech on the Internet. I took the position that state censorship of hate speech should be confined to narrow category of extreme expression – that which explicitly or implicitly threatens, advocates or justifies violence against the members of an identifiable group, even if the violence advocated in not imminent – and that the restriction of this narrow category of expression should be dealt with under the Criminal Code rather than the CHRA.

Research paper prepared for the Law Commission of Ontario.

The approach of both domestic Georgian authorities and international organisations to solving the displacement crisis created by the 2008 Russia–Georgia conflict charted a new path.1 It was radically different than approaches taken in the early 1990s when Georgia was faced with mass displacements following the secessionist conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In particular, the expectation that a prompt return to homes of origin would be the preferred durable solution to the displacement was quickly abandoned for a sizeable number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) forced to leave their homes during the 2008 conflict. In its place, the two other theoretically accepted – but much less widely used – durable solutions to displacement (local integration and resettlement) have been embraced with unprecedented speed and vigour, with both funding and logistical support in place to implement such plans.

At the turn of this century, the editors of a special issue of the journal International Organization suggested that a greater ‘move to law’ was occurring and that a trend towards the ‘legalization of world politics’ was taking place.1 While this view was contemporaneously criticised as presenting a simplistic conception of law, one which failed to adequately account for the dynamic interaction between norms and policies and between legal and political actors,2 the basic insight that international law and politics intersected seemed undeniable. The 2003 Iraq invasion shook this view. Realists (and ‘neo-cons’ who thought of themselves as realists) were quick to point out that hard power was back – if indeed it had ever gone – and that any ‘liberal moment’ that had emerged in the 1990s (evidenced by robust collective action through the Security Council and the creation of the International Criminal Court, among other things) had ended.3 Many legal scholars perceived a ‘crisis in confidence’ for international law. Some responded to this ‘crisis’ by suggesting that international law reorient itself to new threats and new realities, chipping away for example at the 1945 United Nations (UN) Charter framework that restricted the use of force to narrow exceptions.4