The United Nations Human Rights Committee released this report yesterday, which raises critical concerns about the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, and more.
Some of our feminist friends worked hard on submissions to this UN committee, including Sharon McIvor, Shelagh Day, and Gwen Brodsky.
Filed under Community News
What are the obligations of governments and their lawyers, as respondents in human rights litigation? What are the implications of current litigation efforts being made by governments to exempt their conduct as service-providers from compliance with their human rights legislation? Equality rights litigator Gwen Brodsky will focus on the case of First Nations Child and Family Caring Society v. Canada, a challenge to under-funding of on-reserve child welfare services. This case is currently before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal.
Gwen Brodsky is a leading national and international expert on equality rights and the Charter. She has extensive experience arguing equality rights cases before tribunals and courts, and has acted as counsel in leading cases in the Supreme Court of Canada, including Andrews, Swain, Mossop, Thibaudeau, Gould, Vriend, Meiorin, Gosselin, Keays, and Moore. She has also appeared before commissions and treaty bodies of the UN and the Americas. She was the first Litigation Director of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF).
For the past decade, Dr. Brodsky’s work has focused on the inter-connections between equality rights, social and economic rights, and Aboriginal rights, and on the means of fulfilling them in constitutional and human rights contexts. She is counsel to the petitioners in McIvor v. Canada, a challenge to sex discrimination against Aboriginal women and their descendants under the Indian Act. This case, which is ongoing, has already resulted in law reform which has had the effect of making 45,000 Aboriginal women and their descendants newly eligible for Indian status. She represented the Native Women’s Association of Canada on the issue of the murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in BC.
Tuesday, 21 January @ 12:30 PM
Room 122, Allard Hall (1822 East Mall)
Filed under Law School
Dr. Gwen Brodsky is in residence at UBC Law this year as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar. She is currently teaching Law 309C, a seminar on “Sexism in the Law as a Tool of Colonialism” in our JD program (Fall 2013).
Dr. Brodsky (LLB, Victoria; LLM, Harvard; PhD, Osgoode) is a leading national and international expert on equality rights and the Charter. She has extensive experience arguing equality rights cases before tribunals and courts, and has acted as counsel in leading cases in the Supreme Court of Canada, including Andrews, Swain, Mossop, Thibaudeau, Gould, Vriend, Meiorin, Gosselin, Keays, and Moore. She has also appeared before commissions and treaty bodies of the United Nations and the Americas, and was the first Litigation Director of the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF).
For the past decade, Dr. Brodsky’s work has focused on the inter-connections between equality rights, social and economic rights, and Aboriginal rights, and on the means of fulfilling them in constitutional and human rights contexts. She is counsel to the petitioners in McIvor v. Canada, an ongoing challenge to sex discrimination against Aboriginal women and their descendants in the Indian Act, and represented the Native Women’s Association of Canada on the issue of the murders and disappearances of Aboriginal women and girls before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry in British Columbia.
Dr. Brodsky has written extensively about equality rights theory, social and economic rights, the Charter, the duty to accommodate, and access to justice problems experienced by members of disadvantaged groups. She has taught in the Faculty of Law at the University of British Columbia and in the Akitsiraq Law Program in Iqaluit.
If you wish to get in touch with Dr. Brodsky, her contact information while at UBC is as follows:
Dr. Gwen Brodsky
Distinguished Visiting Scholar
Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia
tel: 604 874 9211
gbrodsky@mail.ubc.ca
Filed under Law School
W. Anita Braha
by Susan Boyd and Camille Israel
W. Anita Braha gave an inspiring talk titled “A Feminist Practice: A Chronicle of Issues Over the Years” about her experiences as a feminist and a human rights lawyer. Her stories showed us that her work on feminist projects as a student gave her experience and contacts that paid off in future opportunities.
During this time, she was asked to represent the first complainant under the University of Toronto’s sexual harassment policy, who was an engineering student. At issue was whether leering constituted sexual harassment. The defendant, 60-year old chemical engineering professor Richard Hummel, was accused of following and intensely staring at female swimmers at Hart House Pool. The board held that his actions did constitute sexual harassment. The decision was immediately appealed, and the defense hired Morris Manning, a prominent criminal litigator. As co-counsel, Anita retained Kate Hughes, who later represented LEAF in its intervention in Meoirin v. BCGSE, the landmark gender discrimination case. Anita’s client won the appeal, but the decision was not uncontroversial. Maclean’s columnist Barbara Amiel strongly criticized the case as “the utter debasement of the genuinely serious nature of sexual harassment.”
Filed under Legal Profession
