Human rights

As a focal point for research, dialogue and outreach, McGill’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism continues the University’s long tradition of turning knowledge into groundbreaking advances in protecting the equality and dignity of Montrealers.

Even as a McGill undergrad, Madeleine Parent (BA1940) was fighting injustice; as a member of the Canadian Students Assembly, she worked to create bursaries for underprivileged children. Only two years after graduation, she led 6,000 textile workers to unionize. She later organized the Canadian Textile and Chemical Union, and, in 1969, the Confederation of Canadian Unions, which repatriated Canadian unions that held American allegiances. An ardent advocate for equal pay, and a defender of the rights of First Nations women, Parent was a founding member of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

McGill Law professors Paul-André Crépeau and F.R. Scott prepared the 1971 Rapport sur un projet de loi concernant les droits et libertés de la personne, which was used to draft the 1975 Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms – a document that is unusual for North America in its coverage of not only fundamental civil and political rights, but social and economic ones as well.  Crépeau also created the framework that informed the revised Civil Code that Quebec adopted in 1994, and his name

In response to a string of controversies surrounding the “reasonable accommodation” of religious groups, Professor Emeritus Charles Taylor (BA1952) joined with sociologist Gérard Bouchard to chair the 2008 Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences. Informed by months of public hearings, the commission’s 300-page report offered ideas for how Quebec can adapt to the realities of a secular, pluralistic society.

McGill’s contributions to furthering ideas of understanding and respect extend well past our hometown and country. In 1946, McGill law professor John Peters Humphrey (BCom1925, BA1927, BCL1929) was appointed the first Director of the United Nations Division of Human Rights. There, he drafted the milestone Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Eleanor Roosevelt called “the international Magna Carta for all mankind” upon its adoption by the UN. During two decades at the UN, Humphrey oversaw the implementation of more than sixty international conventions and constitutions for dozens of countries.