As its contribution to the federal election debate, the Canadian section of the international human rights organization Amnesty International today released a new report entitled Strengthening our Commitment: A Human Rights Agenda for Canada.

The group says it wants to draw the attention of candidates to crucial national and international human rights challenges that it claims Canada has not been doing enough to meet. The report outlines 10 areas in which it says Canada has been falling behind:

• Human rights and national security laws
• Human rights in Canadian foreign policy
• Canada on the world stage
• The rights of Indigenous

A note from Maritime Law Book points out that cases from the Ontario Divisional Court from 1984 to the present are available free on MLB’s Ontario Appeal Cases database and that CanLII offers Div. Ct. (Ont.) cases from 2002 to the present only. . . . [more]

Francis Gurry, formerly a Senior Lecturer in Law in the University of Melbourne, was appointed Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in the spring and will take office on October 1. Yesterday he gave an acceptance speech to the the General Assembly of WIPO in which he outlined some of the challenges facing the UN organization and its member states. From the press release:

“The functional consequence of this trend [to harness the economic value of innovation through the acquisition of property rights] is that the system is becoming a victim of its own success” with patent

The Canadian Insolvency Foundation invites applications for the fourth annual Lloyd Houlden Research Fellowship. The $20,000 Houlden Fellowship will be awarded for a paper that addresses current issues in Canadian insolvency policy and practice. Papers should be 7,000 to 10,000 words in length and should be written for an audience consisting of those involved in insolvency practice, insolvency law or in the development and analysis of insolvency policy.

The author should propose an original analysis of innovative ways to improve the insolvency system, a historical analysis of particular features of the system or an exploration of any other insolvency-related idea. . . . [more]

Courtesy of the Goa Blog (although it’s also in today’s Hindu (Chennai edition):

Country’s first e-law library inaugurated

Panaji (PTI): Goa Chief Minister Digambar Kamat inaugurated the country’s first e-law library here aimed at facilitating legal practitioners. . . . [more]

Dear slawers,

Even if I became a very very occasional contributor, and not the contributor that I was supposed to be, may I again be permitted to contact slaw’s great audience in publicizing the next event that I am co-organizing October 2nd (PM) and 3rd, 2008 named “Is eCommerce Law different?” Behind this question, we ask ourselves if we must approach IT law in the same manner we do traditional law or rather as a “law of the horse” as coined by Llewellyn and used by Judge Easterbrook in his debate with Lessig? Fifteen years after . . . [more]

DISMISSED WITHOUT COSTS / REJETÉES SANS DÉPENS

Jean Coutu Group (PJC) Inc. et al. v. Metcalfe & Mansfield Alternative Investments II Corp. and Other Trustees of Asset Backed Commercial Paper Conduits Listed in Schedule “A” to this application et al. (Ont.) (Civil) (By Leave) (32765)

(The motion to expedite the applications for leave to appeal brought by the Respondents on August 27, 2008, is granted. The applications for leave to appeal and other relief sought from the judgment of the Court of Appeal for Ontario, Number C48969 (M36489), 2008 ONCA 587, dated August 18, 2008, are dismissed without costs.

Coram: . . . [more]

The recent decision of the Ontario Superior Court in De Wolf v. Bell ExpressVu has been hailed, at least by the plaintiff, as a win for the consumer. Myself, I admit to some doubts: the reasoning of the decision suggests that any victory is Pyrrhic at best.

For those who haven’t read the decision, the plaintiff challenged Bell ExpressVu’s practice of charging an “administration fee” of $25 on delinquent accounts, on the basis of the Criminal Code prohibition of “interest” exceeding 60%. Bell argued – and, in fact, the court agreed – that the fee was a fair estimate of . . . [more]

This morning the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) announced that the international ‘Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics’ for 2008 ((Sponsored by the German Association for Computing in the Judiciary (‘Deutscher EDV-Gerichtstag e.V.’) and the German-language legal information service provider ‘juris GmbH’ (Germany’s ‘LexisNexis’ or ‘Lovdata’) )) has been awarded to Morten Bergsmo for his creation and development of the Case Matrix, a tool designed to make work on accountability for international crimes committed in armed conflicts more precise and effective.

Keen Slaw readers can read the award in Norwegian here.

Case Matrix is a unique, law-driven

I’m surprised that we haven’t talked about Ghana in Slaw – especially ((as every articling student in a corporate rotation knows)) the grand-daddy of modern corporate law statutes in the Commonwealth ((Yes, older than the Dickerson Report which led to the CBCA or the Iacobucci/Prithard/Pilkington report which spawned the ABCA)) was the work which Jim Gower did on company law in Ghana in the late Fifties ((See Reform of Company Law in Ghana, Journal of African Law, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1958), pp. 140-142)). Gower’s life is one example of a dying breed, the peripatetic English academic/law reformer . . . [more]

Two stories on cell phones, with a question or two:

1. An article from London Review of Books (“Short Cuts” by Daniel Soar) on how cell phone location records and use records can categorize the users — for marketing, for finding terrorists (or people who may be terrorists …), etc.

Is there a cure for this, besides just using land lines? Or is it a problem, rather than an opportunity?

2. A judicial decision in US district court [opinion of Magistrate Judge | order on appeal] saying that the state needs reasonable and probable grounds before . . . [more]

It was being reported generally yesterday (BBC News, New York Times) that hackers, a group called Anonymous, broke in to Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email accounts and copied some material which they then made public.

It doesn’t seem as though the material taken will in any way compromise or even embarrass the Governor — except in so far as it reveals her injudicious use of a large public email system in connection with government and important personal matters. It’s unlikely that any of us will suddenly find ourselves nominated for vice-president of a country, even a small . . . [more]