| Revision as of 21:45, 25 January 2017 edit38.64.174.86 (talk) partial save -- interrupted by errors in editor -- continuingTags: references removed Visual edit← Previous edit | Revision as of 22:04, 25 January 2017 edit undo38.64.174.86 (talk) cleaned up and added new cites to section on law society complaints, formerly the only thing in the "controversy" heading, and incorporated it under a longer headingTags: references removed Visual editNext edit → | ||
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| In 2006, Attaran's research found evidence that the Canadian Forces were detaining and transferring civilians to units of the Afghan government known for torture. This finding propelled the ], in which Attaran and human rights lawyer Paul Champ acted as legal counsel for ] and the ] in a judicial review of the Canadian Forces’ detainee policy. Although the Federal Courts found that torture could not be justified under s. 7 of the '']'', it ruled that the ''Charter'' lacks extraterritorial reach to the Canadian Forces' overseas military expeditions. Nonetheless, the Court's decision confirmed that Canada knew about detainees being tortured, as with a man who had "bruising ... consistent with the beating described", and whose story was corroborated by "Canadian personnel a large piece of braided electrical wire and a rubber hose" in the interrogation room.<ref>'''', 2008 FC 162. </ref> The Court's ruling that "Canadian Forces will undoubtedly have to give very careful consideration as to whether it is indeed possible to resume such transfers in the future without exposing detainees to a substantial risk of torture" led to strengthening the detainee policy shortly thereafter. | In 2006, Attaran's research found evidence that the Canadian Forces were detaining and transferring civilians to units of the Afghan government known for torture. This finding propelled the ], in which Attaran and human rights lawyer Paul Champ acted as legal counsel for ] and the ] in a judicial review of the Canadian Forces’ detainee policy. Although the Federal Courts found that torture could not be justified under s. 7 of the '']'', it ruled that the ''Charter'' lacks extraterritorial reach to the Canadian Forces' overseas military expeditions. Nonetheless, the Court's decision confirmed that Canada knew about detainees being tortured, as with a man who had "bruising ... consistent with the beating described", and whose story was corroborated by "Canadian personnel a large piece of braided electrical wire and a rubber hose" in the interrogation room.<ref>'''', 2008 FC 162. </ref> The Court's ruling that "Canadian Forces will undoubtedly have to give very careful consideration as to whether it is indeed possible to resume such transfers in the future without exposing detainees to a substantial risk of torture" led to strengthening the detainee policy shortly thereafter. | ||
| From 2009 to 2015, Attaran litigated a case at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario which sought to expand the reproductive rights of women and men by compelling the ] to fund ] irrespective of sex or disability. Ontario's practice had been to provide IVF only when a woman was infertile, and only where her disability affected the fallopian tubes, thereby excluding other forms of female infertility disability (e.g. cancer, endometriosis), and entirely excluding infertile men. The litigation |
From 2009 to 2015, Attaran litigated a case at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario which sought to expand the reproductive rights of women and men by compelling the ] to fund ] irrespective of sex or disability. Ontario's practice had been to provide IVF only when a woman was infertile, and only where her disability affected the fallopian tubes, thereby excluding other forms of female infertility disability (e.g. cancer, endometriosis), and entirely excluding infertile men. The litigation convinced Ontario to strike an that included Attaran in exchange for him adjourning the hearing, the result of which was that the province finally accepted to fund IVF, mooting the legal challenge.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2015/10/01/ohip-to-cover-in-vitro-fertization-treatments.html|title=Ontario to cover in-vitro fertilization treatments {{!}} Toronto Star|website=thestar.com|access-date=2017-01-25}}</ref> | ||
| From 2013 on, Attaran has advocated for Canada's law societies to enforce their rules of professional conduct and civility on lawyers who are primarily known as politicians or activists. These efforts have been unsuccessful, as in the case of Canada's Attorney General, Peter MacKay, misusing his office and stature as Canada's top law enforcement official to insinuate that an opponent, Justin Trudeau, committed a crime by smoking marijuana (ingesting marijuana is not an offence in Canada), or the case of right-wing activist Ezra Levant, who in addressing a Hispanic lawyer on national television used a vulgar Spanish epithet.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.theprovince.com/news/MacKay+comment+regulator+says/9009923/story.html |title=MacKay's pot comment OK, regulator says |publisher=Theprovince.com |date=2013-10-08 |accessdate=2014-02-06}}</ref> <ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/law-society-under-fire-for-dismissing-complaints-against-ezra-levant/article24000086/|title=Law society under fire for dismissing complaints against Ezra Levant|newspaper=The Globe and Mail|language=en-ca|access-date=2017-01-25}}</ref> The law societies of Nova Scotia and Alberta dismissed both cases. | |||
| ==Advocacy== | |||
| In 2004, Attaran wrote an opinion piece with ], published in the '']'', arguing that the ] should incorporate democratic principles in its funding criteria, and avoid funding dictatorships. | |||
| On September 9, 2005, he wrote another opinion piece in the Times criticizing the ] for not adopting quantifiable metrics for its ]. | |||
| ==Criticism== | |||
| In 2009, Attaran authored a cover story in the Literary Review of Canada, entitled "The Ugly Canadian", which criticized Canada's human rights record in antiterrorism cases such as that of Omar Khadr, or the handling of military detainees in Afghanistan, both of which were widely considered incidents where serious abuses or torture took place with Canada's knowledge.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2009/06/the-ugly-canadian/ |title=The Ugly Canadian | Literary Review of Canada |publisher=Reviewcanada.ca |date= |accessdate=2014-02-06}}</ref> | |||
| In 2013, Attaran filed a complaint with the Nova Scotia Bar Association for comments by Canada's Minister of Justice ] that ] had broken the law by using marijuana, as that amounted to a colourable use of the Attorney General's office to insinuate that a private citizen committed a crime, without due process, trial, or finding of guilt (using marijuana, as opposed to trafficking it, is not a criminal offence in Canada). Attaran's complaint was dismissed, as the Bar Association decided that it did not have jurisdiction over lawyers in public office.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.theprovince.com/news/MacKay+comment+regulator+says/9009923/story.html |title=MacKay's pot comment OK, regulator says |publisher=Theprovince.com |date=2013-10-08 |accessdate=2014-02-06}}</ref> | |||
| On November 27, 2013, Attaran filed a complaint alleging professional misconduct against the lawyers who negotiated a $90,000 cheque between Senator Mike Duffy and the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright, in exchange for which Senator Duffy agreed to follow talking points from the ]. Attaran alleged that even if this conduct fell short of bribery at a criminal standard (Senator Duffy was later charged, but acquitted) it "violated legal ethics" for lawyers knowingly to transact funds intended to influence an office holder in the exercise of official duties <ref>{{cite web|url=http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/27/mike-duffy-nigel-wright-payment-lawyers-have-professional-misconduct-complaints-launched-against-them/ |title=Mike Duffy-Nigel Wright payment lawyers have professional misconduct complaints launched against them | National Post |publisher=News.nationalpost.com |date=2013-11-27 |accessdate=2014-02-06}}</ref> On October 29, 2014, the Toronto Star reported that Attaran's allegations against the lawyers “were fully investigated and closed.”<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/10/26/case_closed_on_lawyers_in_mike_duffynigel_wright_affair.html |title=Case closed on lawyers in Mike Duffy-Nigel Wright affair | Toronto Star |date=2014-10-29 |accessdate=2014-10-29}}</ref> | |||
| ==See also== | ==See also== | ||
Revision as of 22:04, 25 January 2017
 | This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Amir Attaran" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (September 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| Amir Attaran | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | San Diego, California |
| Nationality | Canada, USA, Iran |
| Occupation(s) | Professor, University of Ottawa |
| Known for | Human rights and public health work |
Amir Attaran (Template:Lang-fa) is an Canadian-American-Iranian law and medicine professor. Currently, Attaran is a Full Professor in both the Faculty of Law and the School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Community Medicine at the University of Ottawa.
Early life and education
Attaran was born in California to immigrants from Iran. He attended public schools in Sacramento area.
Attaran earned a B.A. in neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, after which he worked in the x-ray crystallography laboratory of Professor Robert Stroud at the University of California at San Francisco on a project to determine the 3-D structure of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor.
Attaran received a predoctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for graduate studies in the biomedical sciences, leading to degrees from Caltech (M.S., 1992) and Oxford University (D.Phil., 1996). At Oxford, he matriculated to Wadham College and studied under Professor David Shotton of the Department of Zoology and Professor Alain Townsend of the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. His doctoral thesis examined how killer T-cells modify themselves structurally in response to viral infections as a precursor to granulocyte- and apoptosis-mediated cytotoxicity, and is entitled "CTL cytotoxicity and the cytoskeleton: a microscopial study".
While at Oxford pursuing his science doctorate, Attaran simultaneously enrolled in law school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He graduated with an LL.B., was called to the bar in 1999, and has been a barrister and solicitor of the Law Society of Upper Canada since 2005.
From 2000 to 2003, Attaran held a junior academic position at Harvard University in the Kennedy School of Government, where his research focus was on public health law and policy. At Harvard he co-directed the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health in the Center for International Development under Jeffrey Sachs, and researched the influence of patent law on the ability of patients to access life-saving medicines and the human right to health at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy under Michael Ignatieff. From 2003 to 2005, Attaran taught at Yale University in the School of Public Health, and was a fellow at Chatham House (formerly the Royal Institute of International Affairs) in London, where he researched global development, patent law, and access to essential medicines for neglected diseases such as malaria.
Notable work
Attaran has had a diverse career as a scientist, lawyer, scholar, and advocate for public health, human rights and environmental protection.
While a graduate student at Oxford, the university secretly ordered its scientists to “remove radioactive warning labels” from dangerous laboratory waste, and instructed them to dispose of it covertly in the city’s sewerage and rubbish bins. Scientists in the Department of Zoology where Attaran was based opposed the policy as "unacceptable", and Attaran waged a successful whistleblowing campaign that reversed it.
While practicing environmental law at the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now called Ecojustice), Attaran was counsel on a successful administrative law challenge to the issuance of wood incineration permits in British Columbia that caused exceptionally high levels of smoke and small particulates (PM 10) that harmed asthma patients. This is possibly the earliest instance of the right to a healthy environment being fully litigated as a constitutional right under s. 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the right to life, liberty and security of the person).
In 1999 and 2000, Attaran was an environmental lawyer participating in the negotiation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, which banned the manufacturing and use of certain toxic substances. Attaran led a controversial global campaign of over 400 scientists and medical doctors, inlcuding several Nobel prize winners, who wanted an exemption to use DDT in public health because it is extremely effective in reducing the deaths of children from malaria. South Africa's Medical Research Council subsequently invited Attaran to draft the public health exemption, which countries agreed at the sixth and last negotiation session in Johannesburg as Annex B of the Stockholm Convention. Although once opposed, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund now accept using DDT in small amounts for public health, and the World Health Organization adopted it as a recommended malaria control strategy.
In 2001, Attaran acted as an advisor on patent and trade law to Brazil’s Ministry of Health, to defend against a legal challenge the United States brought at the World Trade Organization, which sought to force Brazil to amend its patent laws and prohibit the affordable, generic versions of HIV/AIDS medicines on which the health ministry depended. Attaran and his colleague Paul Champ developed a legal strategy involving a retaliatory challenge to US patent laws. The United States withdrew its case under public pressure and Brazil continued using generic HIV/AIDS medicines for its population.
In 2001, Attaran and Jeffrey Sachs, then at Harvard working on the WHO Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, published an influential paper in The Lancet that the editors of that journal credited as the “blueprint” for fighting the global HIV/AIDS pandemic on a large scale. Attaran and Sachs proposed a new, multi-billion dollar fund that would be "based on grants, not loans, for the poorest countries", and which would be "judged as having epidemiological merit ... by a panel of independent scientific experts." Attaran and Sachs' policy innovations were widely championed by advocates, and incorporated into the design of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria which launched later that year. The Fund has since saved over 20 million lives.
In 2006, Attaran's research found evidence that the Canadian Forces were detaining and transferring civilians to units of the Afghan government known for torture. This finding propelled the Canadian Afghan detainee scandal, in which Attaran and human rights lawyer Paul Champ acted as legal counsel for Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association in a judicial review of the Canadian Forces’ detainee policy. Although the Federal Courts found that torture could not be justified under s. 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it ruled that the Charter lacks extraterritorial reach to the Canadian Forces' overseas military expeditions. Nonetheless, the Court's decision confirmed that Canada knew about detainees being tortured, as with a man who had "bruising ... consistent with the beating described", and whose story was corroborated by "Canadian personnel a large piece of braided electrical wire and a rubber hose" in the interrogation room. The Court's ruling that "Canadian Forces will undoubtedly have to give very careful consideration as to whether it is indeed possible to resume such transfers in the future without exposing detainees to a substantial risk of torture" led to strengthening the detainee policy shortly thereafter.
From 2009 to 2015, Attaran litigated a case at the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario which sought to expand the reproductive rights of women and men by compelling the Ontario Health Insurance Plan to fund in vitro fertilization irrespective of sex or disability. Ontario's practice had been to provide IVF only when a woman was infertile, and only where her disability affected the fallopian tubes, thereby excluding other forms of female infertility disability (e.g. cancer, endometriosis), and entirely excluding infertile men. The litigation convinced Ontario to strike an advisory panel on infertility that included Attaran in exchange for him adjourning the hearing, the result of which was that the province finally accepted to fund IVF, mooting the legal challenge.
From 2013 on, Attaran has advocated for Canada's law societies to enforce their rules of professional conduct and civility on lawyers who are primarily known as politicians or activists. These efforts have been unsuccessful, as in the case of Canada's Attorney General, Peter MacKay, misusing his office and stature as Canada's top law enforcement official to insinuate that an opponent, Justin Trudeau, committed a crime by smoking marijuana (ingesting marijuana is not an offence in Canada), or the case of right-wing activist Ezra Levant, who in addressing a Hispanic lawyer on national television used a vulgar Spanish epithet. The law societies of Nova Scotia and Alberta dismissed both cases.
See also
References
- "Amir Attaran on the treatment of Afghan detainees". Globe and Mail. 2007-03-09. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
- Stroud, R. M.; McCarthy, M. P.; Shuster, M. (1990-12-18). "Nicotinic acetylcholine receptor superfamily of ligand-gated ion channels". Biochemistry. 29 (50): 11009–11023. ISSN 0006-2960. PMID 1703009.
- Attaran, Amir (1995-01-01). CTL cytotoxicity and the cytoskeleton: a microscopial study (Thesis). Thesis DPhil--University of Oxford.
- "The Law Society of Upper Canada". www2.lsuc.on.ca. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- "Center for International Development at Harvard University (CID) :: People". 2001-01-24. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- "Carr Center for Human Rights Policy". 2002-10-14. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- "In the public eye | University Affairs". University Affairs. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- Brown, Paul (25 May 1993). "Oxford labs told to flush N-waste". The Guardian (London).
- Mutschke et al v. Northwood Inc., BC Environmental Appeal Board, Appeals 99-WAS-06/08(d), 99-WAS-11/12/13(d), 00-WAS-01(d).
- Stolberg, Sheryl Gay (1999-08-29). "DDT, Target of Global Ban, Finds Defenders in Experts on Malaria". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- "Doctoring malaria, badly: the global campaign to ban DDT". BMJ : British Medical Journal. 321 (7273): 1403–1405. 2000-12-02. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 1119118. PMID 11099289.
- Kristof, Nicholas D. (2005-01-08). "It's Time To Spray DDT". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- "The use of DDT in malaria vector control. WHO position statement". World Health Organization. Retrieved 2017-01-24.
- Paul, Champ,; Amir, Attaran, (2002-01-01). "Patent Rights and Local Working Under the WTO TRIPS Agreement: An Analysis of the U.S.-Brazil Patent Dispute". Yale Journal of International Law. 27 (2). ISSN 0889-7743.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Editorial (2001). "Grants, not loans, for the developing world?". The Lancet. 357: 1.
- Attaran, A.; Sachs, J. (2001-01-06). "Defining and refining international donor support for combating the AIDS pandemic". Lancet (London, England). 357 (9249): 57–61. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(00)03576-5. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 11197373.
- Amnesty International Canada v. Canadian Forces, 2008 FC 162.
- "Ontario to cover in-vitro fertilization treatments | Toronto Star". thestar.com. Retrieved 2017-01-25.
- "MacKay's pot comment OK, regulator says". Theprovince.com. 2013-10-08. Retrieved 2014-02-06.
- "Law society under fire for dismissing complaints against Ezra Levant". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2017-01-25.