Foreword

• Author: Mark Freeman, Gibran Van Ert
• Pages: 19-20

Foreword

This book deserves a very warm reception. It is timely and relevant,

appearing as international human rights law itself is promoting and

shaping the globalisation of a culture of rights. As the first comprehen-

sive Canadian international human rights law text, this volume provides

a particularly illuminating Canadian perspective and approach to the

subject, including a very useful consideration of our domestic reception

of international human rights law. In filling this lacuna in the literature,

I expect this work to reduce the reliance previously placed by Canadian

students and instructors on materials developed with American and

British audiences in mind. As if this were not enough, compounding the

value of the text’s unique Canadian perspective, timeliness, and rele-

vance, is the obvious care and exhaustiveness with which it has been

researched and the accessible style in which it is written.

Although the roots of international human rights law can be traced

back at least several centuries, as Freeman and van Ert ably explain, it

only recently emerged as an independent field of law with develop-

ments in the aftermath of the Second World War. Prominent among

these postwar developments were the formation of the United Nations

in 1945 and the adoption and proclamation by the General Assembly

of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948.

The authors skilfully link the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

to this parentage, while others, including the courts, have been more

tentative, or “opaque,” as the authors put it, in doing so.

Apart from the immense value of their work to a Canadian audi-

ence, Freeman and van Ert have provided a useful synthesis of the inter-

national dimensions of human rights law by describing in considerable

detail the history, the content, and the application of the various extant

United Nations and regional human rights instruments. In addition, the

authors expertly outline the major mechanisms through which interna-

tional human rights laws are promoted and protected, a topic that is of

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