Renewal of widespread human-rights commitment key

Alex Neve’s Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World is a passionate call for a reinvigorated commitment to universal human rights. An Ottawa-based international human rights lawyer, Neve served as the secretary general of Amnesty International for nearly two decades.

Published by House of Anansi Press, Universal book accompanies his role as the 2025 Massey lecturer. This includes visits across Canada, including a recent stop at Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights on Nov. 4.

Neve’s through-line is the need to renew our dedication to a robustly universal framework of human rights, one that “applies to everyone, everywhere, always, regardless of who we are, and without exception.” In Universal he argues this is especially pressing in a difficult present where the promises of human right seem far removed, one “riddled with hate, inequality, and disinformation, weighted down with deepening economic injustice, and ravaged by war and genocide.”

Universal makes this case in lively prose supported by Neve’s wide knowledge base. Drawing on four decades of international and local human rights work, Neve offers analysis enlivened by story, memory and example: of his time meeting with Mohammed Salim, a Rohingya refugee who spoke of human rights as a “lifeboat;” the moving events organized by Gitxsan activist Cindy Blackstock and the First Nations Caring Society; or speaking at the Palestinian solidarity encampment at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.

In Universal Neve’s argument is made in five chapters. He begins with the promise of universal human rights, then turns to how people from different cultures and time periods have imagined human rights. Chapter Three argues that human rights are quite literally universal, that people do not need to earn them.

The final chapters of Universal centre Neve’s call to action, urging readers to make small and local changes and offering specific suggestions for how Canada might make good on its lip service to human rights, both at home and abroad.

Universal’s greatest strength is its willingness to acknowledge and centre the failure of universal human rights mechanisms and thinking to deliver on their promises. Neve is 10-toes down for human rights, but his commitment does not rest on an unwillingness to see when, where and how often these promises have failed to deliver.

Crucial here is Neve’s reckoning with Canada’s longstanding unwillingness to recognize the full human rights of Indigenous people. “By any measure,” Neve explains, “the history and contemporary reality of genocide, dispossession, racism, and other widespread human rights violations against Indigenous Peoples is Canada’s most disgraceful story, and it remains unresolved.”

There is also the case of Palestine. “The Palestinian people are live-streaming their own genocide,” Neve explains, “but how can they have faith in promises that have blatantly been disregarded for decades?”

Neve’s response to this damning record and other heart-breaking examples is not to abandon the promise of universal human rights, but to call on us to renew our commitments in the face of them. Not all readers will land in the same place, but will learn from Neve’s sharp mind, long experience and commitment to the ideal of a world, where human rights are literally for everyone.

Adele Perry is the director of the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba (chrr.info).