Raphael Uzan
Dateline: Middle East, Spring 2022
“I will always cherish the opportunity I had to work with Prof. Krantz. At Concordia University, the student-led newspaper would not publish our articles if they weren’t radical or anti-Israel. CIJR was a place where we were able to write!” recalls Mr. Neuer. He also edited and contributed to the institute’s unique-in-Canada student magazine, Dateline: Middle East.”
The challenges posed by the novel virus that left millions of people dead were more than medical. Also at play were human rights issues, as democracies weighed the complex tradeoffs between civil liberties and public health.
According to a 2020 report by Freedom House, a Washington DC-based think-tank, in 7 3 countries, including Canada and the USA, individual rights declined during these last two years. There is little hope that this figure will have much improved in the upcoming 2021 report.
Last December, I discussed these worrying trends with Hillel Neuer, a renowned human rights advocate and former Canadian Institute for Jewish Research (CIJR) intern. I also talked about the state of human rights globally and what steps young people can take to speak out against abuses happening thousands of miles from home.
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Montrealers are exceedingly proud to call Hillel Neuer their own. The 52-year-old executive director of UNWatch, a human rights NGO housed in Geneva, grew up in the De Vimy and later Cote St. Luc boroughs of Montreal, where he attended the Hebrew Academy, a modern Orthodox, pro-Zionist day school. His teachers and rabbis remember him as outgoing, friendly, articulate, and bursting with personality.
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Raphael Uzan is a law student at the Universite de Montreal and a 2022 CIJR Baruch Cohen intern.