Preface

• Author: Mark Freeman, Gibran Van Ert
• Pages: 21-22

Preface

The last fifty years have witnessed the development of a global system

of human rights promotion and protection. Canada has played a signif-

icant role in its growth and there is every indication it will continue to

do so. Canada has ratified and implemented most major international

human rights treaties and actively participates in most multilateral

human rights institutions. We might say that human rights have

become part of the Canadian identity.

It is surprising, then, that a comprehensive, textbook-style account

of international human rights law has never before been undertaken

for a Canadian audience. This book is our attempt to meet this need

and, in doing so, to encourage greater understanding and use of inter-

national human rights law by Canadian litigants, lawyers, and judges.

We have not, however, written this book with the Canadian legal audi-

ence exclusively in mind. To the contrary, we have made a conscious

effort to reach non-Canadian and non-legal audiences too.

International human rights law is a vast field whose borders are not

always clear. In recognition of this, we have included brief but (we

hope) helpful discussions of four areas of international law closely

related to human rights: international labour, refugee, humanitarian,

and criminal law. There are still more human rights-related topics we

were forced to exclude. We have not, for instance, appraised the social

or legal history of human rights in Canada. Nor have we examined

such topics as conflict prevention, disarmament, global trade, and eco-

nomic development. We hope the strengths of what we have included

will outweigh the book’s inevitable limitations.

We have organized the book into three parts. The first part intro-

duces the international law of human rights — its history, its theoretical

underpinnings, and its requirements. The second part describes the

reception of international human rights law in Canada, including gener-

al reception rules and the reception of specific human rights norms into

Canadian law. The third part examines the main Canadian and multilat-

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