The people who inspire CBC Massey Lecturer Alex Neve to fight for human rights

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Ideas53:59The people who inspire CBC Massey Lecturer Alex Neve to fight for human rights

For 40 years, CBC Massey Lecturer Alex Neve has been fighting to uphold the promise of human rights as articulated in the Universal Declaration of 1948. But he hasn’t done it alone.

The people Canadian lawyer has met on the frontlines of human rights struggles have all played a crucial role in his life. Their stories form the beating heart of his 2025 CBC Massey Lectures, Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World.

Neve tells IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed that he was first introduced to what he calls “the very essence of human rights activism” in his Calgary home as a kid.

He was eight years old when his father, Robert Neve, suddenly died of a heart attack. His mom, Jean Neve, a stay-at-home mom raising two young kids, was forced to go back to work — without reliable childcare.

“So in the early ’70s, when I think the notion of daycare was probably seen — at least in Alberta — as a bit of a communist plot, [my mom] became a daycare campaigner,” Neve told Ayed.

Neve fondly remembers when the babysitter arrived, he’d watch his mom leave the house for a planning meeting or public event, carrying a see-through plastic bag full of buttons that read: Daycare Now!

As a widow, Jean, seen here with young Alex, worked as a dietitian who ran the kitchen at the Calgary General Hospital. Families would have to cobble childcare arrangements with neighbours, but Jean knew that was not a sustainable solution. (Submitted by Alex Neve)

That moment ignited a spark in Neve that would eventually lead to his life’s work.

“It left in me this sense of ‘there are lots of things in this world that aren’t right, that are unfair, that need to improve and that can be changed. And we shouldn’t just complain about that.

“We shouldn’t lament the fact that things aren’t OK. We should do what we can to try to fix it.’”

A father’s influence

Neve’s father, Robert, also practiced law, and had a reputation at his firm for underbilling his clients, says Neve.

“There was something in him that was focused on what really matters, that people get the representation or the support or the services they need — and the financial side of things, that’s for another day,” Neve said.

A vintage photo of a man sitting at a work desk holding the phone — As a kid, Alex Neve loved visiting his dad, Robert, at the office. He would hang out in the law library, swing around in his father’s swivel chair and play with the dictaphone. (Submitted by Alex Neve)

Neve says he has wonderful memories of spending time at his father’s office, and believes his dad’s altruism had an effect on how he approaches human rights law.

“I certainly feel like I must have been absorbing something.”

‘The beginning of a long partnership’

The acknowledgements in the book version of Neve’s Massey Lectures list a chorus of people — both living and dead — whom Neve says he continues to carry with him.

One of them is Mauritian human rights activist, Gaëtan Mootoo, a researcher from Amnesty International based in Paris. Neve and Mootoo travelled often together, from isolated regions on the edge of war zones, to refugee camps, to overcrowded, dangerous prisons.

“He and I did our first frontline mission together to Guinea in Western Africa in 2001. And that was the beginning of a long partnership.”

A desert-like location with a white church in the background, while two men stand posing for the camera — Gaëtan Mootoo, right, and Neve in Mauritania, 2013, researching into concerns about torture in the country’s prisons. (Submitted by Alex Neve)

Neve says what he learned from Mootoo is that human rights work was “all about people.”

Information is part of the work, Neve points out, but “what really matters more than anything is to make sure that people feel heard.”

Walking through corridors of power in national capitals across Africa, Neve says he was always struck by Mootoo’s determination to find “the tea lady.”

“She’s the one who really matters here, and it was calculating on his part, because he knew that if we were in good with the tea lady, number one, we were going to get tea. But number two, she would be the one who would be able to tell him, ‘there’s no one with the minister right now and follow me, we’ll head down.’”

A BIPOC man and woman are reading over a big booklet — Gaëtan Mooto in western Côte d’Ivoire in 2011, for a research mission documenting human rights violations associated with post-election violence and the refusal of the sitting president to accept the election results. (Submitted by Alex Neve)

Neve says a crucial part of human rights work is paying attention to the people who are overlooked.

“There is so much that is important and vital that they carry, that they can teach us and that’s the best kind of human rights work.”

‘Guttural’ shame

In the early 2000s, Amnesty International Canada began working on a groundbreaking report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. The lead researcher was Mohawk lawyer, Bev Jacobs.

Neve says meeting Jacobs changed the way he felt about Canada. She was a pioneering, lonely voice trying to make the country acknowledge what was happening to Indigenous people everywhere, he says.

Jacobs warned Neve that every Indigenous person he would meet “will have a story of a mother, a sister, an aunt, a daughter, a cousin, who they hold very, very dear, who is missing, has been murdered, or has been through agonizing levels of violence because they are Indigenous.”

Neve told Ayed that moment felt “guttural.”

“It is such a deep, deep indictment of us as a country that we’ve allowed that to be reality for decades and decades and decades without even paying attention to it.”

An older white man and an Indigenous woman stand together posing and smiling — Mohawk lawyer Bev Jacobs, right, was involved in the writing and research for Amnesty International’s 2024 report, Stolen Sisters, about Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women and Girls in Canada. (Submitted by Alex Neve)

Neve’s sense of shame quickly transformed into conviction — not only for him but for his colleagues, too.

“It was about us as Canadians.”

‘The right to belong’

During the Massey Lectures tour stop in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, on Oct. 15, Neve met a young Innu woman named Cheyenne Michel.

Neve participated in a listening circle at the Labrador campus of Memorial University with a group of local Innu and Inuit women, leaders and activists — all of whom he said shared “deep concerns, wisdom, experiences, and challenges.”

Michel was the last to speak. She was nervous and asked if she could read what she wrote on her phone. Her words resonated with Neve on a deep level as Michel shared “incredible pearls and nuggets of thoughtful wisdom and clearly, very personal reflection.”

“She said for her at the end of the day, focusing especially on this notion of universal human rights, it really comes down to one thing, and that is the right to belong.”

A bird made out of seal skin, a gift to Alex Neve — Ed, a bird made of sealskin and leather, perches on Neve’s desk. It was a gift from Sharon Edmunds, an Inuk woman who was part of the listening circle and attended Neve’s lecture in Happy Valley-Goose Bay. Before Neve went on stage, ‘she said, here’s someone [Ed] to keep you company.’ (Submitted by Alex Neve)

After decades of human rights conversations, academically, in conferences, in activist circles, Neve says he’s never heard human rights described so succinctly.

“’The right to belong’ gets to the notion of who are left out of this human rights club we’ve created over the decades,” Neve told Ayed, adding the words also highlight our need to be part of the solutions.

“We have this ability and this important responsibility to ensure that rights do soar,” Neve said, adding that he included Michel’s wisdom in the final two Massey Lectures.

“Cheyenne Michel’s words, I think, are gonna stay with me for a long, long time.”

Download the IDEAS podcast to listen to this conversation and the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures.