A central feature of Canadian history since the mid-twentieth century has been ‘the rights revolution,’ the quest to articulate and give legal protection to human rights and fundamental freedoms. In many ways, as with other Western nations, this struggle has become the country's defining metanarrative, giving identity, normative ideals and purpose to Canadian nationhood and jurisprudence, especially with the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Canadian Constitution of 1982. It is the intention of this article to study historically the complex role of religion in an early phase of the human rights narrative in Canada. The focus is on the religious dimension of the passage in 1960 by the Progressive Conservative Government of John Diefenbaker of Canada's first national human rights instrument, the Canadian Bill of Rights. It will be argued that the churches played an important but ambiguous role in relation to the human rights movement which, in some ways, presented perceived challenges to their own religiously-grounded metanarratives of Canadian history, identity, and destiny. A central thesis advanced is that the 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights reflected and legislated a pluralism which was religiously-positive in integrating the nation's principal religious and political values under the formula affirmed in the bill's Preamble: “that the Canadian Nation is founded upon principles that acknowledge the supremacy of God, the dignity and worth of the human person and the position of the family in a society of free men and free institutions (…).”

India's Constitution of 1950 was, on the whole, a creation of the Western spirit, superimposed on a society and a culture with a complex traditional legal system. But constitutions are more than simply legal texts which can be adopted at will; they are also means of cultural self-portrayal and mirrors of cultural heritage. This is illustrated here by an analysis of the tortuous history of the Basic Structure Doctrine in India's constitutional discussions. Although this doctrine, developed by Carl Schmitt during the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany, was introduced to India by the Supreme Court in order to reduce the flood of constitutional amendments, it soon underwent major reinterpretations and later referred to overarching principles of the Constitution. In this way the Constitution became permeable to some of the surviving traditional legal concepts of India. An appendix provides a comparison with the unwritten principles of the Canadian Constitution. In contrast to the Indian situation, the Canadian unwritten principles have no superlegal status and the written constitutional rules take precedence over them. Any constitutional amendment realized according to the prescribed procedure is legal, and no higher principle would provide legal continuity.

The literature is replete with numerous examples of attempts to either abolish or reform traditional practices that violate the rights of people in different societies around the world. Few success cases have, however, been recorded. The recent anti-trokosi campaign in Ghana against female ritual servitude is one of the few success cases. By August 2000, 59 % of all known trokosis had been liberated. Today, it is estimated that less than a couple of hundred of trokosis are still held in bondage. The campaign, which started as a Christian religious crusade against the Ewe traditional religious practice of trokosi, backfired initially as it met with hostility and little cooperation from the shrine owners and practitioners. However, by 1995, the strategy changed from a religious to an international human rights campaign paving the way for the first mass liberation of trokosis in 1996. The author argues that the peculiar type of human rights approach adopted, which was based on education, dialogue, cultural sensitivity, and mutual respect, accounts largely for the success of this campaign.

In his recent work, Professor Harry Arthurs dismisses the idea of industrial citizenship as being a fundamental paradigm for the study of labour law, although he has supported it convincingly since 1967. Part of this change of mind is based on the legalization process of labour arbitration, which is due, at least to some degree, to the penetration of this field by complex human rights standards. For Arthurs, legal pluralism, characteristic of collective labour relations, is being progressively eroded by the movement of legalization initiated by the Canadian Charter. The author intends to put this thesis to the test, by examining what is going on in Quebec, as regards labour arbitration and human rights. The overall context is not exactly the same, the Quebec Charter being somehow of a specific nature, more open to social rights than it is the case for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But concerning the right to equality, there is enough common ground to allow a comparison. The author then uses the results of an empirical study (content analysis, semi-directed interviews) conducted at the School of Industrial Relations and the Centre de recherche en droit public of the University of Montreal, which considers discrimination cases at work decided by arbitrators and by the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal. This empirical study reveals the self-referential nature of this process in both cases: even if the Law is the same, the way of constructing and applying it is quite different in the sphere of labour relations (the arbitrators) and in the sphere of human rights (the Human Rights Tribunal). This may be explained by the diverging interests and values of the actors involved, and by the pressures the industrial relations system imposes on the arbitrators, who may be portrayed as a “coupling mechanism” between this social system and the legal one. This is not to say that Arthurs' legalization thesis is “wrong”, just that for the time being, it cannot be firmly asserted in the Quebec context. That being said, Arhturs' past and present work on industrial citizenship remains of the outmost scientific relevance to grasp the actual stand of industrial relations and labour law.

In the aftermath of violent crime, survivors are confronted by questions of comprehension, healing, normalcy, accountability, and restoration. These same issues are communicated to audiences via mass media coverage of the crime and ensuing legal proceedings that focus upon survivors while they are in the public eye—and while those suspected of the crime are in the defendant's chair. Such stories bring a human face to the innocents most affected by the outcome of the proceedings, relaying their involvement in and response to legal developments from arrest to execution. This paper examines these chronicles through the lens of narrative theory, practices integral to human communication and memory. It discusses how the mass media makes use of narrative practices in covering crises, events that in effect demand narration. This paper then focuses upon the suturing potential of narrative, its ability to knit together understandings of crises into beginnings, endings, and points in between. This discussion is illustrated by a content analysis of stories covering Dennis and Judy Shepard, whose son Matthew was brutally slain in 1998, from the time of the murder to the prosecution of the killers and beyond.

This paper examines the Chinese Canadian pursuit for head tax compensation through an exploration of the social and political discourses surrounding redress and through the legal case itself, Mack et al. v. The Attorney General of Canada. Although the case never reached the courts, except to determine whether calls for redress had any basis in Canadian law, the juridical reasoning alongside public and state contestations reveal the complex ways in which these claims may be influenced by dominant Canadian national mythologies. My central argument is that the courts, politicians, and the public have read the Chinese Canadian redress campaign through two liberal national-racial myths that circulate within and sustain Canadian discourses of multiculturalism. Throughout, I show how these mythologies – of immigration as “choice” and Chinese Canadians as “model-minorities” – have both influenced and shaped the juridical, political, and social responses to head tax compensation in ways that have diminished Chinese Canadian struggles for justice. In the conclusion, I consider the valuable lessons that we may learn from the Mack case and from the Chinese Canadian redress movement more generally.

Using two reports about the practice of racial profiling in Toronto, I argue that racial profiling must be understood as a category of governance. My argument for understanding racial profiling as a category of governance is to insist upon a move away from questions or investigations that ask whether racial profiling occurs as a police practice. Instead, by understanding racial profiling as a category of governance, I argue that scholars and practitioners can begin to expose how different racialized practices regulate the boundaries of citizenship and ultimately work to establish how citizen rights are organized, policed and implemented. I conclude by suggesting why it is useful to speak of a “category of governance” as a concept that has wider potential use in the study of racial profiling, particularly as it pertains to the variety of ways in which certain populations are made (or are not made) into subjects/citizens of modern nation states.