Ideas53:59The people who inspire CBC Massey professor Alex Neve to fight for human rights
For 40 years, CBC Massey Professor Alex Neve has been fighting to uphold the promise of human rights as expressed in the Universal Declaration of 1948. But he hasn’t done it alone.
The people the Canadian lawyer has met on the front lines of human rights struggles have played a crucial role in his life. Their stories form the beating heart of your 2025 CBC Massey Lectures, Universal: Renewing human rights in a fractured world.
neve counts IDEAS presenter Nahlah Ayed who first met what he calls “the very essence of human rights activism” in his Calgary home as a child.
He was eight years old when his father, Robert Neve, died suddenly of a heart attack. His mother, Jean Neve, a housewife raising two young children was forced to go back to work — without reliable child care.
“So in the early ’70s, when I think the notion of daycare was probably seen (at least in Alberta) as some sort of communist plot, [my mom] I became a daycare activist,” Neve told Ayed.
Neve fondly remembers when the babysitter would arrive, watching her mother leave the house for a planning meeting or public event, carrying a clear plastic bag full of buttons that said: Daycare Now!
That moment lit a spark in Neve that would eventually lead him to his life’s work.
“It left me with this feeling that ‘there are a lot of things in this world that are not right, that are unfair, that need to be improved, and that can be changed. And we shouldn’t just complain about that.’
“We shouldn’t bemoan the fact that things aren’t right. We should do what we can to try to fix it.”
The influence of a father
Neve’s father, Robert, also practiced law and had a reputation at his firm for undercharging his clients, Neve says.
“There was something about him that focused on what really matters, that people get the representation or the support or the services that they need, and the financial side of things, that’s for another day,” Neve said.
Neve says he has wonderful memories of spending time in his father’s office and believes his father’s altruism had an effect on his approach to human rights law.
“I certainly feel like I must have been absorbing something.”
‘The beginning of a long collaboration’
The acknowledgments in the book version of Neve’s Massey Lectures list a chorus of people, both living and dead, that Neve says he continues to carry with him.
One of them is Mauritian human rights activist Gaëtan Mootoo, a Paris-based researcher at Amnesty International. Neve and Mootoo often traveled together, from isolated regions on the edge of war zones, to dangerous, overcrowded refugee camps and prisons.
“He and I did our first frontline mission together in Guinea, in West Africa, in 2001. And that was the beginning of a long partnership.”
Neve says what she learned from Mootoo is that human rights work “is all about people.”
Information is part of the job, Neve notes, but “what really matters more than anything is making sure people feel heard.”
Walking the corridors of power in Africa’s national capitals, 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 of her, because she knew that if we were okay with the tea lady, number one, we were going to have tea. But number two, she would be the one who could say, ‘there’s no one with the minister right now and follow me, we’ll go down.'”
Neve says a crucial part of human rights work is paying attention to people who are ignored.
“There are so many important and vital things that they do that they can teach us and that is the best kind of human rights work.”
‘Guttural’ shame
In the early 2000s, Amnesty International Canada began work on a groundbreaking report on missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. The lead investigator was Mohawk attorney Bev Jacobs.
Neve says meeting Jacobs changed how she felt about Canada. She was a lonely, pioneering voice trying to get the country to recognize 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 dear, who is missing, has been murdered, or has gone through agonizing levels of violence because they are Indigenous.”
Neve told Ayed that moment felt “guttural.”
“It’s such a profound indictment of us as a country that we’ve allowed that to be a reality for decades and decades and decades without even paying attention to it.”
Neve’s feeling of shame quickly turned into conviction, not only for him but also for his colleagues.
“It was about us as Canadians.”
‘The right to belong’
During the Massey Lectures tour stop in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador, on October 15, Neve met a young Innu woman named Cheyenne Michel.
Neve participated in a listening circle at Memorial University’s Labrador campus with a group of local Innu and Inuit women, leaders and activists, who she 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 had written on her phone. His words resonated with Neve on a deep level as Michel shared “Incredible pearls and nuggets of thoughtful wisdom and a clear and very personal reflection.”
“He said that at the end of the day, especially focusing on this notion of universal human rights, it all comes down to one thing, and that is the right to belong.”
After decades of conversations about human rights, academically, at conferences and in activist circles, Neve says she has never heard human rights described so succinctly.
“‘The right to belong’ refers to the notion of who is left out of this human rights club that we have created over decades,” Neve told Ayed, adding that the words also highlight our need to be part of the solutions.
“We have this ability and this important responsibility to ensure that rights soar,” Neve said, adding that he included Michel’s wisdom in the last two Massey Lectures.
“I think Cheyenne Michel’s words will stay with me for a long, long time.”
Download the IDEAS Podcast to listen to this conversation and the 2025 CBC Massey Lectures.
