Rosalie Silberman Abella, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer who survived the Auschwitz slaughter, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1946. A few weeks before, the first Nuremberg trials had begun prosecuting alleged Nazi war criminals on a world stage.<\/p>\n
Abella, who spoke at Harvard on Monday (March 1), is now a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada, the first Jewish woman to attain that post. But her memories of a darker time have never left her. Her mother also was an Auschwitz survivor, and her older brother died in a concentration camp. He was 2 years old.<\/p>\n
Discussing the importance of human rights, she said, \u201cTo me, this is not just theory.\u201d<\/p>\n
Holding back tears, Abella shared memories of her father\u2019s postwar letters, her childhood in a ruined Germany, and her father\u2019s salvation by Allied mentors. \u201cThese Americans believed in him,\u201d she said, \u201cand they gave him back the belief that justice was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Abella was 2, her father introduced human rights champion Eleanor Roosevelt at the camp, apologizing for having so little to provide. \u201cThe best we are able to produce are these few children,\u201d he said. \u201cThey alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
The postwar years provided a shining example of American justice that Abella said propelled her along an ascendant path in jurisprudence, and fired her passions. \u201cMy life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, and no justice,\u201d she said. \u201cIt created an unquenchable thirst in me for all three.\u201d<\/p>\n
Along with democracy, rights, and justice, said Abella, comes the freedom to embrace an identity \u201cwith pride, dignity, and peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
Identity \u2014 how to preserve it, when to modify it for the common good \u2014 was at the heart of Abella\u2019s hour-long lecture, \u201cIdentity, Diversity, and Human Rights.\u201d It was part of the 2009-10 Dean\u2019s Lecture Series at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.<\/p>\n
Early on, Abella was a family court judge, \u201cthe youngest and the first pregnant judge in history,\u201d said Harvard Law School<\/a> Professor Frank I. Michelman<\/a>, who warmly introduced his longtime friend.<\/p>\n Michelman, the Robert Walmsley University Professor, described Abella\u2019s passion for human rights law, labor relations, law reform, and breaking employment barriers for women and \u201cvisible minorities.\u201d<\/p>\n Abella has 27 honorary degrees, and a degree in classical piano from the Royal Conservatory of Music. Radcliffe Dean Barbara J. Grosz shared a friend\u2019s description of Abella as \u201cspellbinding, brave, and a breath of fresh air.\u201d<\/p>\n Canada\u2019s foremost legal authority on human rights used her Radcliffe lecture to call for a reconsideration of the rule of law. This venerable concept has sometimes given legal cover to human rights abuses, she said, including South African apartheid, Jim Crow segregation, and Nazi Germany\u2019s genocide.<\/p>\n \u201cWe need the rule of justice,\u201d said Abella, \u201cnot the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n Arriving at a rule of justice requires the world to embrace \u201ccore democratic values,\u201d what she called \u201cthe instruments of justice.\u201d These include due process, a free press, the right of association, and protections for minorities.<\/p>\n But a universal rule of justice seems further away now than it did in 1946, said Abella. In the postwar period, the world awakened to something beyond the individual rights touted for centuries, thanks to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and other sweeping thinkers. World War II introduced the idea of \u201cthe rights of the group,\u201d she said, a guarantee not just of civil liberties, but of human rights.<\/p>\n Abella longed for the \u201cluminous world vision\u201d of the aftermath of World War II. That vision prompted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Convention on Genocide (1948), and the 13 Nuremberg trials (1945-1949), the \u201cphoenixes that rose from the ashes of Auschwitz and roared their outrage.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the following few decades, that outrage yielded \u201cthe most sophisticated array of laws, treaties, and conventions the international community has ever known,\u201d said Abella, \u201call stating that rights abuses will not be tolerated.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet, she said, the world has since failed to embrace the three lessons that emerged from World War II: that indifference is the incubator of injustice; that it\u2019s not what you stand for, it\u2019s what you stand up for; and that people must never forget how the world looks to the vulnerable.<\/p>\n Abella recapped this recent backsliding on human rights with a list of nearly 20 examples of genocide, flagrant rights abuses, and outlaw nations.<\/p>\n By the 1980s, human rights advances had stalled worldwide, said Abella, in part because of widespread opposition to \u201cthe diversity theory of rights\u201d and its association with the notion of \u201cpolitical correctness.\u201d By the 1990s, she added, the world was in the throes of a \u201crights distress,\u201d as instances of genocide and abuse picked up in speed and numbers.<\/p>\n To this day, on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, \u201cWe still haven\u2019t learned the most important justice lesson of all,\u201d said Abella, that there is a need to close the gap between the values we articulate and the values we enforce. The result is \u201can inexplicable international tentativeness\u201d over human rights issues, she said. \u201cWe need more than the rhetoric of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the problem today is a dithering United Nations, said Abella, who recalled the specter of a failed League of Nations following World War I. The world has reached a similar turning point with the United Nations, she said, since its inaction has failed its great ideals. So it is time, said Abella, for \u201cthat most difficult of global conversations: Is the United Nations the best we can do?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rosalie Silberman Abella, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer who survived the Auschwitz slaughter, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1946. A few weeks before, the first Nuremberg trials had begun prosecuting alleged Nazi war criminals on a world stage. Abella, who spoke at Harvard on Monday (March 1), is now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393913"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393913\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}