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Feb. 10, 2006
Humanitarian award
Winnipeg lawyer David Matas helps people from around the world
and he will be honored for it.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
He has worked with Amnesty International, Beyond Borders, Canada-South
Africa Co-operation, Canadian Helsinki Watch Group, the Canadian
Council for Refugees and the International Commission of Jurists,
to name several. He has held government appointments to the United
Nations General Assembly, the Stockholm International Forum on the
Holocaust and the Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe
conferences on anti-Semitism, to name a few. He has held a number
of academic appointments, participated on many trial and election
observation teams around the world and has written numerous books
and manuscripts, including the recently published Aftershock:
Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism. He has done all of this while
working as a private practice lawyer in refugee, immigration and
human rights law. It is easy to see why David Matas is being honored
this month with the Brotherhood Interfaith Society's Man of the
Year Award.
The Brotherhood Interfaith Society was founded in 1996. It is made
up of five diverse Vancouver communities: the B'nai B'rith Foundation
of B.C., the Ismaili Muslim Community of B.C., the Vancouver Chinatown
Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, B.C. and Yukon, and Confratellanza
Italo – Canadese.
Sam Shamash, who is chairing this year's ceremony, said that the
society's purpose is mainly "building understanding, cross-tolerance
and co-operation between various religious [and] ethnic organizations,
and also to promote equality and unity, so that we overcome racism."
The five groups attend each other's functions and they are ready
to settle things down and co-ordinate understanding, if there is
an incident that causes racial tensions to escalate in British Columbia,
said Shamash. He added that the society is trying to get the Iranian
and Sikh communities to join.
The Man of the Year Award has been presented annually since 1970.
"The criteria [for the award] are that somebody has to be an
outstanding Canadian citizen ... who [has] made a large difference
to our community and humanity, so it's a service to the community,
country and humanity."
Each year, there is a different sponsoring organization for the
potential honoree – this year that group was the B'nai B'rith
Foundation – that puts forward three names for consideration
and the committee of the society, which includes members from the
five groups that comprise it, selects the award-winner.
In the society's choice of Matas as this year's Man of the Year,
Shamash said it was the variety of charitable organizations with
which Matas was involved that made him stand out among the candidates.
"Generally, you'll find a lot of people really active with
Red Cross or [the] Cancer Society or one organization," said
Shamash. "This guy [Matas] was incredible in the number of
organizations that he's been involved, like Helsinki [Watch Group],
Amnesty [International] ... Beyond Borders, United [Nations] General
Assembly, all kinds of anti-Semitic stuff – this is not only
Jewish organizations like B'nai B'rith [or] Canadian Jewish Congress,
with which he's very active. He was even called to Kabul, to Afghanistan,
last year, I believe, to monitor elections. So, there's a Jewish
guy from Canada going into a Muslim country and helping the refugees
coming back to Afghanistan. A lot of these things he does pro bono
and so that's what stood out for him."
Matas told the Independent that he first got involved with
human rights issues through his profession as a lawyer with a refugee
law practice, since refugees are victims of human rights violations.
"Dealing with human rights generally in the source countries,
the countries from which the refugees came, is a way of dealing
with the problems in a more general way and sort of removing the
root causes that generate the refugee outflow.
"Also, when I was growing up, I was very much struck by the
Holocaust and wanting to do something about it. Through human rights
work and writing and advocacy, it's given me an opportunity to come
to grips with, in some way, the phenomenon of the Holocaust and
to make some contribution to making some sense out of it."
In the promotional material for the society dinner, Matas is cited
as saying that the lessons of the Holocaust are clear: "Prosecute,
convict and punish mass murderers. Protect refugees. Never accept
in silence the gross violations of human rights. Ban hate speech."
In speaking to the Independent about why these lessons are difficult
to implement, Matas said they each have their own obstacles.
"Each of these goals has their own kind of nemesis or horseman
[of the Apocalypse] that is opposing them. When you're dealing with
Nazi war criminals, I think there's a problem of indifference, or
insularity. I mean, people, I find, they feel that these are crimes
that happen to somebody else, by somebody, in another country and
they just don't care or they don't feel it affects them, so there's
a problem of communicating the universality of human rights, the
indivisibility of humanity and the problems of impunity in one crime
[which] means crimes are repeated and so on. That's the problem
I've been facing with war criminals – the indifference and
the insularity.
"When it comes to refugees, there's a certain amount of racism
and xenophobia. There's also an unwillingness to believe. People
have difficulty identifying with the refugee plight because it's
so different from their own and they have a tendency to think that
refugees are economic migrants because refugees usually come from
poorer countries to Canada, which is a richer country. They tend
to think that's the motivation, so there's the whole problem of
getting through the skepticism of the decision-makers, the media
and the politicians ... looking at it through Canadian eyes, where
we don't have the experiences that refugees have or where the world
doesn't work in these other countries the way it works in Canada.
I think that it's a problem, again, of people not focusing on the
people in front them, instead looking at it through the opposite
of rose-tinted glasses, maybe black-tinted glasses, I guess you
could say. That's the problem with refugees.
"When it comes to advocating human rights generally around
the world," he continued, "there is a sense of helplessness,
the notion of 'what can I do about violations of a long ways away,'
whereas the reality is of course [that] international pressure makes
a lot of difference to respect for human rights. Very often, these
violations occur in a context where people aren't paying attention
or don't care or aren't doing anything about them and turning the
spotlight on them really does help to remedy them.
"With hate speech, there's the problem of what I would call
free speech absolutism ... meaning that free speech matters more
than any other human right, has priority over all other rights and
it's the lynchpin for the whole human rights system. I've heard
that expressed a lot of different times in a lot of different ways
but my own view is that the right to be free from incitement to
hatred is as important as the freedom of expression. The two have
to be balanced one against the other and you can't just have one
human right and say that's all there is," he concluded.
Matas travels extensively, working on many projects at once. He
can range from spending a month working from his home in Winnipeg
to, for example, being in five countries in the space of a month,
which was what he said he did this January.
"While I'm here or there, I'm also working on my practice as
best I can." he said. "[If] there's a memoranda that has
to be written, it can be written from anywhere. When I'm traveling,
I check my e-mail, call my office, answer my messages. When I'm
in my office seeing clients, I'm also dealing with the human rights
work and the articles. I do a lot of academic stuff. I don't just
write books, I do peer reviews of academic articles and review books
for different publishers for publication and so I'm always carrying
this stuff around with me and I'm reading it. I'm doing as much
as I can related to my work all the time."
Matas spoke to the Independent from Ottawa, the night before
he was to head to Haiti to act as an election observer.
"I'm part of an election observation team," he explained.
"There are 106 short-term Canadian observers, 20 long-term
Canadian observers. The Canadian team is part of an international
team, which Canada is actually leading. We're basically just keeping
an eye on the election to make a report, or to contribute to a report,
about whether or not the elections were free or fair, which will
be made by the team. We'll each feed in our information and the
leadership of the team will produce a report about their own evaluation
of the elections."
About the state of the world, Matas said he has seen many places
that have improved, others that have not, giving Zimbabwe as an
example of a country that has gone backward in the last few years,
rather than forward.
"In terms of fatalities, if you look at fatalities from wars,
they have gone down in the last few years and the world refugee
population has gone down," said Matas. "Right now, things
look a little more positive than before, but within that overall
scheme, there are situations and countries where things have gotten
worse, rather than better. Look at Israel now, with Hamas as the
government and leading power of the Palestinian Authority –
that situation is worse, not better.
"What you're dealing with in human rights violations in a sense
is human nature and human nature doesn't change. The proclivity
for doing harm and doing evil is always going to be with us and
the battle for human rights never ends. I think part of the reason
I am able to keep going is the realization that I can't expect an
easy or quick victory in this and it's unrealistic to do that."
Matas encouraged everyone to become involved.
"The issue of human rights arises in a lot of different contexts
in a lot of different countries in a lot of different ways and there
are many different rights," he said. "I would say people
should get involved in the area that they're interested in and the
right that they're interested in. I mean, even I am very involved
in the issues of hate speech and anti-Zionism and refugees, but
I'm not that involved in the right to housing or the right to food
or the right to adequate medical care and so on. It's too much to
expect anybody to get involved in everything, but I think it's important
that everyone get involved in something. To me, part of being human
[is] to identify with humanity, to help humanity, to show solidarity
with the rest of humanity. So I would say, pick your right, pick
your country, pick your subject, but do something."
The Brotherhood Interfaith Society Man of the Year Award will be
presented to Matas at a dinner on Feb. 25 at the Richmond Country
Club. In addition to many other activities, the event will feature
entertainment by Tzimmes, led by Moshe Denburg, joined by saxophonist
Saul Berson and perhaps another musician. Tickets for the dinner
are available by contacting Shamash at 604-257-7365 or [email protected]
or Neil Ornstein at 604-684-5356 or [email protected].
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