The six years that remade human rights (2025 CBC Massey Lecture 2)

The ideals behind the concept of human rights — such as the sacredness of life, reciprocity, justice and fairness — have millennia-old histories. After the carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, these ideas took a new legal form. In his second Massey Lecture, Alex Neve considers six dizzying years that laid out a blueprint for a new world. Lecture two of the 2025 CBC Massey Lecture series: Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World Speaker Alex Neve Secretary-General of Amnesty International Canada (2000 to 2020); adjunct Professor in international human rights, University of Ottawa, Human rights lawyer Author of Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World