The Honourable Louise Arbour was the speaker at last night’s Hycroft Lecture, sponsored by the University Women’s Club of Vancouver.  It was a great privilege to hear her as she is warm, funny, and has a great mind. I was introduced to her before she spoke and managed to take a photo of her with my friend and her former student at Osgoode Hall, Stephen Hammond .

Madame Arbour has been named President and CEO of the International Crisis Group and will assume the post in Brussels in July, 2009.  She reflected on her life experiences and her desire to move from a retrospective stance that legal thinking requires to a future focus on preventing conflicts.

Arbour spoke about the importance of keeping the judiciary separate from politics and that criminal justice must be less politicized.  She spoke about the failure of the western world in supporting Roosevelt’s 1941 Declaration of the four essential human freedoms:

• freedom of speech and expression
• freedom of worship
• freedom from want
• freedom from fear

Arbour spoke eloquently about gender equality being the most obvious failure of many nations, with discriminatory practices all over the world.  She ended by stating that she believes in “deep and profound change, the mobilizing power of ideas, and, not surprisingly, I believe in women.”

Eve Ensler, creator of “Vagina Monologues”, talks about the learnings in her life and the path she found herself on by doing this work.

“When we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us.”

Wow.