xanawu

I just realized how boring this paper sounds:

Paragraph 2 is also similar to Article 10 of the draft articles recommended by the WCED’s Experts Group on Environmental Law, which aims to prevent “transboundary environmental interference or significant risk thereof which causes substantial harm” (emphasis added). The present provision extends liability not only to physical harm, but also to the risks of that harm, allocating the loss of potential damage to the State that takes on the risky activity.

Starting second paper, about 3 days behind, but just had to post this: I’m writing about Canadian security certificates and was reading a report by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) about Canadian security officials (read: CSIS) targeting Arab Muslims for “interrogation”.

Talk about questionable tactics: blocking doorways, threats, visits at work (one guy got fired shortly afterwards), giving false identification as to who they were, interrogating a minor. One person was asked to become an informant, and when he refused, the official abruptly ended the interview and proceeded to recite the names of the person’s children and several other pieces of personal information.

The security certificate provisions in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act are undergoing a constitutional challenge which will finally be heard by the Supreme Court in June. This is the first time I really care about the Supreme Court doing it right, and I’m actually worried about the outcome: these provisions are so blatantly against several fundamental rights in the Charter, and yet have passed through the federal courts as constitutional. Reading the judgments in the Charkaoui case are so so so disturbing, they are unlike any other constitutional cases (they don’t even mention so much as a section 7 analysis for #$%$-sake), the reasoning just doesn’t make sense.

I really hope it’s simply an unhappy coincidence that federal court judgments are incomprehensible, and not indicative of an endemic belief that someone can be put into detention without charge and without knowledge of the evidence against him, on the grounds of “national security”. We cannot simply trust that the government is always right since no one is infallible (especially CSIS), and when evidence is not open there is not even the opportunity to check this arbitrary power.

More later. For now, the report can be found here.

I was starting to panic (as I have been daily) about wtf I am going to write 15 more pages about in my paper, but my unproductiveness was probably a sign from my brain that I needed to rest.

During exams the law library closes at 11:45 pm, so I had to find somewhere else to work. (side note: regularly it closes at 9:15, or even 7:45 on weekends–something law students regularly complain about. how sad.) Went to one of the second cups by concordia, but since it was just a freaking zoo there, my friend J and I ended up at tim horton’s. And despite the fact that all day I only managed to write 2 measly pages, I just couldn’t face my laptop again–instead I commiserated and contemplated with J about exams, careers, summer business plans, political philosophies, and yes, even patent laws (which is what my paper is about, specifically about the access to medicines problem and TRIPS).

I guess I needed to shoot the shit for a couple of hours, because it was on the 10-minute bus ride home that epiphany hit, and I finally clued in to what was brewing in my paper! brilliant!

so apparently my paper-writing approach is like the (crappy) rodin-analogy they make about the common law: chipping away at the surface to discover the piece of art underneath…

and still I waste my time blogging at 4 am. I’d better get some serious sleep, because I would love to finish this 35-pager tomorrow.