Haverford College

Join us for a talk by Genevieve Painter of Concordia University!

This will be a virtual talk, join the Zoom here.

Bio: Genevieve Renard Painter is an assistant professor at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, at Concordia University. She holds a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from the University of California, Berkeley. Her historical and theoretical work on international law, constitutional law and settler colonialism has been published in the London Review of International Law, Law Text Culture, and a number of edited collections. She sits on the executive of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. In 2021, she won Concordia University's Presidential Excellence in Teaching Award (non-tenured). Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Painter gained practice experience litigating aboriginal and constitutional cases in Montreal, and she conducted policy work in international criminal justice in the Hague.

Abstract: Since before Canada's confederation until amendments to the Indian Act in 1985, Indian women, unlike Indian men, lost their Indian status if they married non-Indians. Indian status determines individual eligibility for federal benefits, and the number of ‘status Indians’ determines federal funding to Indigenous communities. In 1977, protest against sex discrimination in the Indian Act reached the international arena, as a small-town dispute in Tobique, New Brunswick over housing transformed into an international cause célèbre. Sandra Lovelace, one of the women from Tobique, submitted a complaint to the UN’s Human Rights Committee seeking a declaration that Canada’s Indian Act violated the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Though the complaint was started by a group of Indigenous women, it was steered through the UN process by an elite human rights legal community. Sandra Lovelace was victorious, in that the Committee determined that Canada violated the ICCPR. The Lovelace decision is often heralded as a paradigmatic example of the ways that international human rights processes can bolster domestic rights campaigns.

I argue that the significance of the Lovelace case has been misunderstood. Drawing on original archival research, I scrutinize the legal and political battles within the Canadian government about Lovelace's complaint, the impacts of these battles on the Committee's decision-making, and the role of lawyers and political elites, not civil society activists, in transplanting human rights discourses. The Committee endorsed the government’s framing of the legal problem, despite ultimately finding the government at fault. The Committee decided that the Indian Act's status rules violated Lovelace’s rights as a member of a cultural minority, not her gender equality rights. The Human Rights Committee’s decisions set the stage for the federal government to argue that delay to amending the Indian Act was necessary to protect the cultural rights of a minority and balance those rights against sex equality demands. In showing how Sandra Lovelace went to the United Nations Human Rights Committee with a political claim for equality and returned with a private, personal claim as a member of a cultural group, the article refutes prevailing wisdom in the social science literature about the positive effects of international human rights norms on domestic justice struggles.

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