The Canadian Civil Liberties Association marked its 50th anniversary last year. Acting for Freedom: Fifty Years of Civil Liberties in Canada, with Marian Botsford Fraser as primary author, commemorates that anniversary by describing the controversies, court cases and campaigns in which the organization was involved over the first half century of its existence.
A 50th anniversary can be an arbitrary demarcation…
Mark J. Freiman
Mark J. Freiman practises law at Lerners LLP in Toronto. He is a former deputy attorney general for Ontario. In his private practice he has appeared on a wide variety of human rights matters, including acting on behalf of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Articles by
Mark J. Freiman
Human rights are said to be the rights we enjoy simply by virtue of our humanity.
Some 66 years ago, when the nations of the world resolved to proclaim the content of these rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was hardly surprising, in light of the horrific persecutions of the preceding decades, that protection from discrimination and from incitement to discrimination featured prominently on that…
All systems are prone to error and our justice system is no exception.
At one pole, errors in the justice system manifest themselves in “wrongful acquittals,” with perpetrators, although duly apprehended and brought before a court, escaping punishment for their crimes.
We hear a lot about such errors, either real or imagined, especially when high-profile cases…
On January 11, 2008, Ezra Levant, his lawyer and a video camera attended an interview with a human rights officer from the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission. In 2006, Levant had published in the soon-to-be-defunct Western Standard the twelve famous Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that had caused riots in Europe and…
A Giant of Jurisprudence
Bora Laskin’s first full biography illuminates the jurist more than the man November 2005
It was at some point in 1938 that Dean Cecil “Caesar” Wright of Osgoode Hall Law School sat down to write a letter of recommendation for his protégé, Bora Laskin. Wright had been Laskin’s mentor and would continue to be his close colleague and friend as their respective careers intertwined over the better part of the next two…
John Stuart Mill versus the Supreme Court of Canada
Should freedom of expression trump social norms? You be the judge May 2005
One of the great intellectual dustups among the intelligentsia in late Victorian English society was the controversy about the nature of the state’s legitimate power of compulsion.
In his classic On Liberty, John Stuart Mill wrote, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over another member of a civilized…