Human rights panel condemns Canada’s inaction regarding Indigenous people

MONTRÉAL — Canada is failing to meet international legal obligations by refusing to hold thorough investigations into the crimes committed in its residential school system, says a global human rights organization.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal issued its final report Wednesday, saying that the residential schools posed “widespread, systematic and most serious human rights violations.”

Released to coincide with the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the 78-page report urged the Canada to investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators of these violations, and to provide reparations. The tribunal accused the country of doing “very little” to prevent the continuation of discrimination against Indigenous Peoples.

The judgment also condemned Canada for showing “deliberate … contempt” before the international community. It said the country refused to sign certain international conventions and modify its criminal law to include genocide, enforced disappearances and apartheid.

Former prime minister Justin Trudeau and the House of Commons recognized in 2019 and 2022 that the operation of the residential school system constituted an act of genocide. However, the tribunal’s report called the acknowledgments “mostly deprived of practical effect by the extremely limited criminalization of genocide in Canadian domestic legislation.”

It also said those recognitions “have not had tangible consequences or been accompanied by any substantial change in the public policies of the successive governments regarding the treatment of Indigenous Peoples.”

The tribunal reviewed extensive evidence gathered during its hearings last May. The evidence showed that some 15,000 Indigenous children were taken from their communities and sent to residential schools where they were forbidden to speak their language.

The children then faced poor living conditions, inadequate or nonexistent health care, malnutrition, forced labour, harsh discipline and punishment, and sexual abuse.

Indigenous people face continued discrimination, namely through the forced and coerced sterilization of women as well as the removal of children from their communities by welfare services fuelled by a lack of support for Indigenous children both on and off reserves, said the report.

Drawing on the definitions in the International Convention on Genocide, the tribunal concluded that Canada failed to end and remedy the acts of genocide. It cited the Canadian government’s refusal to fund and support the search for missing Indigenous children and their graves.

The judgment additionally accused Canada of “ongoing land theft and the criminalization of Indigenous land defenders by police and other government agencies.”

The actions taken by Canada, the report states, amount to crimes against humanity, as defined by international conventions. These include the enslavement of children through forced labour, the forced transfer of population, severe deprivation of physical liberty, rape and other forms of sexual violence of comparable severity, forced sterilization, and persecution on racial grounds.

It also concluded that Canada had a system of apartheid in place. The report defines apartheid as the institutionalization of segregation and discrimination against a subjugated racial group by a dominant racial group.

In its recommendations, the tribunal asked Canada to conduct thorough investigations into the disappearance and deaths of children in its institutions and that residential schools’ archives and records be conserved.

It called on the government to provide financial support for research related to residential school burial sites, to commemorate and protect these sites, and to fund the revitalization of Indigenous languages.

All sacred objects held by governments, museums, national parks, and academic institutions should be returned to the communities to which they belong, it added.

Several recommendations focus on improving conditions on reserves, particularly in the areas of health and education. Others address respect for territorial rights and reparations for land dispossession.

Several recommendations also target the Catholic Church and other religious communities who operated the residential schools, including reparations for stolen land and the restitution of these lands where former churches are located.

Pierre Saint-Arnaud, The Canadian Press