Canadians shouldn’t be too smug about the notion that Canada is the world’s “human rights good guy,” according to Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty Interna­tional Canada.

Neve was invited as guest speaker at a special session during CAUT’s November Council meeting to mark the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Hu­man Rights.

By his account, while Canada has much to celebrate, it also has much to be ashamed of when it comes to its human rights legacy and much work ahead.

Among the reasons to be proud for the country, he said, “have been great moments of Canadian leader­ship,” both from individual citizens and in peacekeeping, the fight to do away with land mines, the struggle against apartheid and the founding of an International Cri­mi­nal Court.

“But the laurels grow distant,” he warned. “If the past has been an era of leadership, sadly I have to say that we have now moved into the era of, to say the least, disappointment.”

Canada has retreated from leadership in efforts to abolish the death penalty, he said. Canada was the only firmly abolitionist country that declined to cosponsor a resolution before the United Nations General Assembly last fall calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.

Canada has also failed to show leadership in countering what Neve called “the ugly post-September 11th mindset that has sold human rights short in the name of security.” He pointed to the cases of Maher Arar, Ahmed El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin — imprisoned and tortured abroad with Ca­­nadian complicity — and the case of Omar Khadr, held at Guantanamo Bay for six years.

Finally, he pointed to Canada’s refusal to sign on to the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and a framework for their protection. In the struggle to agree on wording Canada had begun to demonstrate some principled leadership, helping to break through roadblocks and build bridges between opposing camps. But just as wording was agreed and it was ready to come to vote before the new Human Rights Council in June 2006, everything changed.

“No longer the champion, Canada now was implacably opposed,” Neve said. “And not only opposed, but determined to aggressively set out to convince other countries to oppose it as well, to see the defeat of the declaration…Governments and NGOs active within UN human rights circles all say they have never seen anything like it from Canada.”

Neve called for action on and be­yond the Dec. 10 anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, high­lighting the power of letter-writing, organizing and speaking out on behalf of citizens at risk in Canada and around the globe.

“We need this anniversary to be marked with loud, agitated, insistent voices, across Canada and worldwide,” he said.