The Hounorable Irwin Cotler is the Founder and Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights in Montreal, where I am honored to be a Senior Fellow. His life is dedicated to the search for justice and peace for all. He is one of the most honored, acknowledged and effective of global human rights thinkers and activists.

Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, Professor Cotler is a greatly respected scholar of constitutional and comparative law. He has been noted for seminal legal arguments and opinions in the critical areas of free speech, freedom of religion, minority rights, peace law and war crimes justice.

As Canada’s Minister of Justice and Attorney General, Cotler reformed Canada’s Supreme Court appointment process, helping to make it the most gender-representative Supreme Court in the world. He chaired the Canadian Cabinet Committees on Aboriginal Rights and appointed the first-ever aboriginal and visible minority justices to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

He initiated the first-ever law on human trafficking; crafted the first-ever legislation to grant marriage equality to gays and lesbians; issued Canada’s first National Justice Initiative Against Racism and Hate. He overturned more wrongful convictions in a single year than any prior Minister.

Cotler became the first recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award for his leadership in the “creation of a beloved community.” He was also the recipient of the Honorary Frederick Johnson Award from the Centre for Research-Action and Race Relations for his exceptional contribution to the rights of the Canadian Black Community

An indefatigable international human rights lawyer, Professor Cotler was Counsel to Nelson Mandela and represented Canada’s Liberal Party at Mandela’s funeral.

Among other renowned prisoners of conscience he defended included Argentina’s Jacobo Timmerman, and Russia’s Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov and Nathan Sharansky. He was the Chair of the International Commission of Inquiry into the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg.

A leading global Parliamentarian, Cotler Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran; Chaired the Inter-Parliamentary Group of Justice for Russia’s slain Sergei Magnitsky; Chaired of the All-Party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition, and Co-Chaired Global Parliamentarians for Tibet.

Cotler was the first Canadian Parliamentarian to call the mass atrocity in Darfur a genocide. He established a Canadian “Day of Reflection on the Lessons of Genocide” referring to the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and was counsel for representatives before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

He has transformed the lives of so many. He was a Member of the International Legal Team of Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo, international legal counsel to imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, the Saudi Human Rights Lawyer, Waleed Abdulhair, Venezuelan political prisoner Leopoldo López, and Shi’ite Cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi in Iran, and Leader of Anti-Slavery Movement in Mauritania, Biram Dah Abeid.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian democracy activist imprisoned by the Egyptian government, was represented by Cotler, and acquitted in 2003. With Cotler, my Institute awarded Ibrahim the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award.

He has been lauded as “Counsel for the Oppressed,” while those of us with the Human Rights Foundation consider him “Freedom’s Counsel.”

Professor Cotler is a member the panel of independent international experts designated by the Secretary General of the OAS to determine whether there was reasonable ground to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela. For his advancement of human rights for Venezuelan people, he received the Special Award by the Standing Committee on Foreign Policy, Sovereignty and Integration of the Venezuelan National Assembly.

He is the first Canadian recipient of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation’s Centennial Medal; the first recipient of the General Romeo Dallaire Award for Human Rights Leadership; the recipient of the Sir Zafrullah Khan Award for Distinguished Public Service, in honor Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister, a renowned international jurist and scholar of the worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

Recognized as a “a scholar and advocate of international stature” in sixteen honorary doctorate degree citations, Professor Cotler is an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.

A legal consultant in the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Cotler has also defended both Palestinians and Israelis against their own governments; and counsel for the Association of Ethiopian Jews before the Supreme Court of Israel. He is the co-Founder and Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism and is a prominent leader in Shoah remembrance.

For decades, Cotler has been a colleague, ally, and a close friend We met in our very early twenties, both young chairs of the US and Canadian delegations to the World Jewish Congress in Israel. Cotler was later chief counsel to the Canadian Jewish Congress at the Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on Nazi War Criminals in Canada.

We collaborated on investigations on the Patriot Act, War Powers Act, extraordinary rendition, torture, civil liberties and national mock Supreme Court and Senate hearings with my Institute’s ALLIES program. As Canada’s Justice Minister, he sought to strike a balance between rights and national security concerns, guarding against arbitrary and unnecessary limits on rights in the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act.

Cotler is the Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran, and with my alumnus Amir Soltani, the Boroumand Foundation, and PEN America, we are working closely together to free Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh. See the webinar that we convened together.

As part of my responsibility as a Senior Fellow at Wallenberg, we worked together to support the opposition to Maduro’s regime in Venezuela; on his submission on “Consular Responsibility to Protect Journalists,” to the High Level Panel of Independent Legal Experts on Media Freedom, as part of Wallenberg’s Media Freedom project.

We are working on anti-corruption efforts to extend the adoption of Global Justice for Sergei Magnitsky legislation; and on Uyghur rights together with a Fellow Wallenberg Fellow, Rayhan Asat.

I proudly wrote the inscription on the Dr. Jean Mayer Award given to Cotler:

“In recognition of a lifelong passion and concern for human rights; for the determination to defend the most illustrious and the most anonymous; for a distinguished career of integrity in international law and in the administration of justice, one dedicated to the dignity of the individual, with compassion for the oppressed and unrepresented”

Yom Hashoah - National Holocaust Remembrance Day - is a poignant and painful historical moment of remembrance and reminder - of bearing witness - of learning and acting upon the enduring and universal lessons of Holocaust remembrance, including;

Lesson One: The danger of forgetting - the imperative of remembrance - le devoir de memoir: of remembrance of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened: of the Holocaust, as Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor Professor Elie Wiesel would remind us again and again: “The Holocaust was a war against the Jews in which not all victims were Jews, but all Jews were targeted victims”; of the demonization and dehumanization of the Jew as prologue and justification for their mass murder; of the mass murder of six million Jews, 1.5 million of whom were children, not just as a matter of abstract statistics, but as we say at such moments, of remembrance: “Unto each person there is a name, each person is an identity, each person is a universe,” reminding us of the teaching -- “hametzil adam ahat, ke’ilu hitzil olam kulo – that if you save a single person, it is as if you have saved an entire universe.” And so, the overriding first lesson: That we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny.

Lesson Two: The Dangers of Antisemitism of which the death camp Auschwitz - the most brutal extermination camp of the twentieth century - is both message and metaphor: 1.3 million people were deported to the death camp Auschwitz; 1.1 million of them were Jews. Let there be no mistake about it: Jews were murdered at Auschwitz because of antisemitism, but antisemitism itself did not die at Auschwitz. It remains the bloodied canary in the mineshaft of global evil today, toxic to democracies, a threat to our common humanity; and as we've learned only too painfully and too well, while it begins with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews. Indeed, antisemitism is a paradigm for radical hate as the Holocaust is a paradigm for radical evil.

Lesson Three: The Danger of State Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide. As the Supreme Court put it, “the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers – it began with words.” These, as the court put it, are the catastrophic effects of racism. These, as the court put it, are the chilling facts of history. It is this teaching of contempt, this demonizing of the other, this is where it all begins. In particular, incitement to genocide is not merely a warning sign of preventable tragedy; it is itself an international crime prohibited in the Genocide Convention. We have a responsibility to recognize, address, and redress this violation of the Genocide Convention.

Lesson Four: The Danger of Holocaust Denial and Distortion, Inversion and Banalization. Holocaust distortion is not only an assault upon history but an assault on memory and truth - a conspiracy to whitewash and cover up the worst crime in history.

Lesson Five: The Danger of Silence in the Face of Evil - where silence becomes complicit with evil itself - and the importance, the responsibility, to speak up, and stand up, and combat the conspiracy of silence.

Lesson Six: The Rescue of Raoul Wallenberg - the Responsibility to Pay Tribute to the Rescuers - the Righteous Among the Nations - of whom the Swedish non-Jew and Canada’s first Honourary Citizen, Raoul Wallenberg is metaphor and message. Raoul Wallenberg demonstrated how one person with the compassion to care, and the courage to act, can confront evil, prevail and transform history.

Lesson Seven: The Danger of Indifference and Inaction in the Face of Mass Atrocity and Genocide. In the face of such evil, indifference is acquiescence, if not complicity in evil itself. For years, we knew but did not act to stop the slaughter of the innocents in Syria, ignoring the lessons of history and mocking the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. What makes the Holocaust, and genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, and more recently the Rohingya and the Uyghers, so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocides – which are horrific enough – but that these genocides were preventable. Nobody could say we did not know. We knew but we did not act. The international community cannot be bystanders to such horror – we must act.

Lesson Eight: The Dangers of Impunity. If the twentieth century, and the first decades of the twenty-first century are the age of atrocity, they are also the age of impunity. Few of the perpetrators have been brought to justice; and so it is our responsibility to ensure that these hostis humanis generis - these enemies of humankind - are brought to justice, lest the culture of impunity incentivize more atrocity crimes.

May I close with a special word for the Holocaust survivors amongst us. For you have endured the worst of inhumanity, yet you somehow found, in the resources of your own humanity, the courage to go on, to build a family, to build a future, and to make an enduring contribution to each of the global communities in which you reside - and where we have all been your beneficiaries.

And so, may this Holocaust Remembrance Day be not only an act of remembrance, which it is, but may it also be a remembrance to act - on behalf of our common humanity, and our universal values.

Irwin Cotler, International Chair of the RWCHR

Irwin Cotler

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