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| Amir Attaran | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | San Diego, California |
| Nationality | Canada, USA, Iran |
| Occupation(s) | Professor, University of Ottawa |
| Known for | Canadian Afghan detainee issue |
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, and earned a B.A. in neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley. Attaran worked in the x-ray crystallography laboratory of Professor Robert Stroud at the University of California at San Francisco on projects to determine the 3-D structure of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor and the HIV/AIDS reverse transcriptase. Attaran subsequently won a prestigious predoctoral fellowship from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and graduated with degrees in the biomedical sciences from Caltech (M.S.) and Wadham College at Oxford University (D.Phil.). His doctoral thesis in the areas of cell biology and immunology, and particularly the morphological adaptations of CD8+ T-lymphocyte granulocyte- and apoptosis-mediated cytotoxicity, is entitled "CTL cytotoxicity and the cytoskeleton: a microscopial study", and was completed under the supervision of Professor David Shotton of Oxford University's Department of Zoology and Professor Alain Townsend of Oxford University and the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine.
While in the science program at Oxford University, Attaran was encouraged by the legal scholar at Wadham College to take tutorials in law. In the final year of completing his doctoral degree in Oxford, Attaran enrolled simultaneously in the LL.B. degree program at the University of British Columbia Law School in Vancouver. Attaran was called to the bar as a barrister and solicitor of the Law Society of British Columbia in 1999, and of the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2005.
Career and Advocacy
Attaran has had a diverse career as a scientist, lawyer, scholar, and advocate for public health, human rights and environmental protection.
Following law school, Attaran practiced environmental law at the Sierra Legal Defence Fund (now called Ecojustice) in Vancouver. He was counsel on a successful Environmental Appeal Board challenge to the British Columbia government approving incineration permits in areas where poor air quality due to PM10 and PM 2.5 was injurious to asthma patients . This is possibly the earliest instance of the right to a healthy environment being fully litigated in the merits as a constitutional right under s. 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the right to life, liberty and security of the person).
From 2000 to 2003, Attaran was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, first in the Center for International Development under Professor Jeffrey Sachs where he was local director of the World Health Organization Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, and later in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy under Professor Michael Ignatieff. At Harvard, Attaran was a scholarly advocate for control of malaria and HIV/AIDS in developing countries, including controversially to argue in Nature Medicine for the renewed but limited use of DDT to reduce malaria deaths among children, and to publish data in the Journal of the American Medical Association quantitatively assessing the impact of pharmaceutical patents in restricting access to life-saving HIV/AIDS medicines in sub-Saharan Africa. Attaran and Sachs also published a landmark study in The Lancet documenting the dearth of overseas development assistance to stem the HIV/AIDS pandemic in poor countries, in which they recommended an order of magnitude increase in funding "based on grants, not loans, for the poorest countries" using peer review mechanisms to select projects for approval. The editors of The Lancet credited the Attaran and Sachs paper as the "blueprint" for the successful creation of the new, multi-billion dollar Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria later that year.
Attaran is an editorial consultant to The Lancet and chairs the international advisory board of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health as well as the board of directors at CASRAI. Attaran has published in the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Literary Review of Canada.
Advocacy
Attaran is extensively involved with malaria advocacy. Cooperating with the organization Africa Fighting Malaria, he has argued publicly for the renewed use of DDT in sub-Saharan Africa to combat malaria. A famous 2004 article authored by Attaran in The Lancet was sharply critical of the WHO for approving ineffective malaria medicines such as chloroquine in a manner tantamount to "medical malpractice". Shortly after that article and a pressure campaign led by Attaran, global policy changed very quickly to make use of artemisinin class medicines.
In 2004, Attaran wrote an opinion piece with Shirin Ebadi, published in the New York Times, arguing that the World Bank 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 United Nations for not adopting quantifiable metrics for its Millennium Development Goals.
In February 2007, he received significant media coverage in Canada when he brought forward testimony by Afghan prisoners captured by Canadians and handed to the custody of the Afghan National Army, who said they had later been abused by the ANA.
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.
In 2013, Attaran filed a complaint with the Nova Scotia Bar Association for comments by Canada's Minister of Justice Peter MacKay that Justin Trudeau 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.
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 Prime Minister's Office. 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 On October 29, 2014, the Toronto Star reported that Attaran's allegations against the lawyers “were fully investigated and closed.”
See also
References
- ^ "Amir Attaran on the treatment of Afghan detainees". Globe and Mail. 2007-03-09. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
- 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).
- "Center for International Development at Harvard University - People".
- Attaran, Amir; Roberts, Donald R.; Curtis, Chris F.; Kilama, Wenceslaus L. (2000-07-01). "Balancing risks on the backs of the poor". Nature Medicine. 6 (7): 729–731. doi:10.1038/77438. ISSN 1078-8956.
- Attaran, Amir (2001-10-17). "Do Patents for Antiretroviral Drugs Constrain Access to AIDS Treatment in Africa?". JAMA. 286 (15). doi:10.1001/jama.286.15.1886. ISSN 0098-7484.
- 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.
- The Lancet (2001). "Grants, not loans, for the developing world?" (PDF). The Lancet. 357: 1.
- "http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61795-4/fulltext". The Lancet. thelancet.com. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
{{cite web}}: External link in|title= - "http://jech.bmj.com/site/about/edboard.xhtml". jech. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
{{cite web}}: External link in|title= - "Board of Directors - CASRAI". ref.casrai.org. Casrai. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
- "Torture and National Security: The Making of a Social Institution". University of Windsor. University of Windsor. Retrieved 29 August 2016.
- http://www.malaria.org/Advocacy%20The%20Beginning/WHO,%20the%20Global%20Fund,%20and%20medical%20malpractice%20in%20malaria%20treatment.pdf
- Oziewicz, Estanislao (2007-02-09). "Activist swamped by abusive messages". Globe and Mail. Archived from the original on 2007-03-19. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|deadurl=ignored (|url-status=suggested) (help) - "Latest Afghan abuse claims spark cries for O'Connor to resign". CBC News. 2007-04-23. Retrieved 2007-04-27.
- "The Ugly Canadian | Literary Review of Canada". Reviewcanada.ca. Retrieved 2014-02-06.
- "MacKay's pot comment OK, regulator says". Theprovince.com. 2013-10-08. Retrieved 2014-02-06.
- "Mike Duffy-Nigel Wright payment lawyers have professional misconduct complaints launched against them | National Post". News.nationalpost.com. 2013-11-27. Retrieved 2014-02-06.
- "Case closed on lawyers in Mike Duffy-Nigel Wright affair | Toronto Star". 2014-10-29. Retrieved 2014-10-29.