The campaign to oppose illegal Israeli military recruitment has broken new ground. The Liberal government recently responded to a parliamentary petition calling for an investigation into those who have recruited or facilitated recruiting for the Israel Defense Forces. Last week, charges were laid on an organization allegedly violating Canada’s Foreign Enlistment Act.

As conservatives in North America, but particularly the US, redouble their efforts to restrict women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, we must applaud Cuba’s popular and democratic decision to draft, discuss, and implement their new Families Code, a powerful document that is one of the world’s most progressive laws concerning women’s rights, familial rights, and LGBTQ+ rights.

On the first day of the United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro made his first address to the body. The speech sharply deviated from those of his conservative predecessors. Petro did not shy away from calling out global North countries for their role in the destruction of the environment and in the perpetuation of the War on Drugs.

On September 15, Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq and the Canadian not-for-profit group Just Peace Advocates submitted a report to the recently appointed United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, calling for Montréal-based WSP Global Inc. (WSP) to be included in a UN database of businesses operating in illegal Israeli settlements.

The utter evil of the Holocaust is not debatable, but the lessons we learn from it are crucial. Is our memory to be used to empower the State of Israel and exempt it from ordinary norms, or is it to be used to urge universal respect for human rights and international law, with a fierce determination that such a calamity should never again be allowed to befall anybody?

Nearly 50 million people were trapped in forced labor or forced marriage on any given day in 2021, according to a new report published Monday, the latest reminder that “the scourge of modern slavery has by no means been relegated to history.” By the authors’ estimate, nearly one out of every 150 individuals on Earth was enslaved last year.

While there is no direct Canadian involvement in the Marikana massacre, Canadian mining companies and the Canadian state played a sizeable role in ensuring that the post-apartheid ANC government did not radically restructure the economy for the benefit of the Indigenous black majority, and that they retained a favourable investment climate for foreign companies.

In recent months, prominent human rights authorities and advocates have all concluded that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is therefore incoherent for the NDP to echo these findings and simultaneously participate in a group promoting “co-operation” with Israel. It’s time for the party to formally disassociate from the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group.

Canadian Dimension spoke with Megan Q. Linton, a disabled and mad studies researcher and writer, and creator of the Invisible Institutions podcast. Megan’s research on institutionalization and disability has appeared in Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch magazine, the Disability Visibility Project and the CBC. Megan is currently a doctoral student at Carleton University.

In a series of alarming events over the past week, Israel has escalated its attacks on human rights defenders. After outlawing six leading Palestinian NGOs in October last year, on August 18, Israeli occupation forces led militarized raids against their offices in Ramallah, damaging property, confiscating files, and attempting to seal their doors shut permanently.