On the first episode of this Rule of Law season, we talked about the rule of law as a “a government of laws and not men”. Our guest on this episode, Professor Irwin Cotler, has his own shorthand for the rule of law: “the pursuit of justice”. If anyone in this world is intimately familiar with the tireless, unrelenting, undaunted pursuit of justice, it is Irwin Cotler – an accomplished academic, renowned international human rights lawyer, former Member of Parliament in Canada, as well as former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Founder and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and currently Canada’s first ever Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Anti-Semitism. In this episode, we discuss his four decades of serving as counsel for some of the world’s most prominent dissidents and political prisoners of conscience, as well as what he sees as worrying signs of a global resurgence in authoritarianism.
Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights
Irwin Cotler named special envoy for Holocaust remembrance and the fight against anti-Semitism (CBC)
