Righting wrongs.

We may live in one of the best countries in the world but many people still are victim of human rights violations.

While they can't undo damage done, it's the job of our courts and human rights commissions to help correct injustices by at least acknowledging them, compensating the victims, and preventing their happening again. Here are some examples of recent court rulings.

A Damaged Life

After years of physical abuse and starvation at the hands of her mother, Leilani Muir was placed in the Red Deer Training School for Mental Defectives. In 1959, at the age of 14, she was sterilized after an IQ test result of 64 (normal scores are between 85 and 115).

In 1996, a judge ordered the Alberta government to pay $740,000 to Ms. Muir. Justice Joanne Veit ruled that Leilani Muir was entitled to damages after being unlawfully sterilized and confined at the Training School for 10 years. The court said the government's actions robbed Ms. Muir of her civil rights and subjected her to humiliation and disgrace.

Judge Veit said staff at the school ignored advice from an expert that Ms. Muir's problems were emotional, not mental. Neither did they use the services of social workers and psychologists who might have helped gather more information about Ms. Muir's troubled background.

"Before admitting her to an institution where she would be sterilized and stigmatized, the government acknowledged that it had obtained only cursory information," the judge said. "This was not an emergency situation...alternatives were available, including foster homes and group homes."

Judge Veit said the stigma of being classified as a "moron" under the government's Sexual Sterilization Act has humiliated Ms. Muir every day of her life. Tests taken well after she left the institution found she has normal intelligence. She didn't know until 1966 that she had been sterilized. As a young girl, she was told the operation was to remove her appendix.

It took Leilani Muir six years to resolve her lawsuit but in the court's judgment: "The circumstances of Ms. Muir's sterilization were so highhanded and so contemptuous of the statutory authority to effect sterilization and were undertaken in an atmosphere that so little respected Ms. Muir's human dignity that the community, and the court's, sense of decency is offended."

Ms. Muir was one of 2,832 people sterilized under the Sexual Sterilization Act, in force between 1928 and 1972. The act was aimed at preventing the "feeble-minded" from having children and passing along their disabilities.

Protecting Society

In 1996, the Ontario Court of Appeal rejected arguments that measures designed to help apprehend impaired drivers have gone too far in weakening the drivers' constitutional rights. Three judges agreed that infringing on suspected impaired drivers' rights is necessary to protect society.

Police are given the authority to investigate drivers and carry out breath tests at the roadside before advising them of their right to call a lawyer.

While some may see that as an infringement of drivers' rights the judges concluded that: "Protecting those who use the public roadways from the menance posed by drinking and driving is a pressing and substantial concern."

Sam-sex Partners

In 1995, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the Charter of Rights prohibits discrimination against homosexuals. The court also said homosexual couples are not eligible for the same public pension benefits as other couples.

In June 1996, a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that two public servants who had been denied benefits for their same-sex partners should now receive them. The case involved a foreign-service officer who was denied moving and housing benefits when he was posted to Indonesia with his male partner. To the couple's astonishment, the government said it would pay to relocate the employee's cat but not his companion.

Six months later, in December 1996, Ontario's Court of Appeal ruled that same-sex couples must be treated the same as opposite-sex couples under family law. The appeal court upheld a lower court ruling that Ontario's Family Law Act violates Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms by permitting only heterosexual couples to sue for support payments.

The court recognized that cohabiting between partners in an intimate relationship, regardless of sexual orientation, creates emotional, and financial interdependencies.

Mothers' Rights

Five judges of the Manitoba Appeal Court decided unanimously in September 1996 that they had no power to order treatment for an unwilling addict during her pregnancy. The court ruling favours the rights of the mother over those of the fetus. This ruling was based on a case that came before the Supreme Court several years earlier. The court said a fetus is not a person in a legal sense; that where the rights of a mother clash with those of a fetus, the mothers' rights prevail.

"Wrongful Birth"

In December 1996, an Ottawa couple was awarded nearly $3 million to raise two sons they say should never have been born. The parents argued in a "wrongful birth" lawsuit that they would have conceived them had two doctors acted properly.

Both boys suffer from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disease that disables and ultimately destroys the body's muscles. Aged seven and eight, the boys are expected to be in wheelchairs by 12 and dead before 30. Death usually occurs from pneumonia after the disease eats away at the respiratory muscles to the point that sufferers can't cough and clear their lungs.

The doctors involved didn't carry out tests that would have revealed the children were at high risk of developing the disease.

Root of a Lawsuit

In September 1996, an Ontario court ruled that a City of Toronto Bylaw prohibiting "excessive growth of weeds and grass" interfered with a homeowner's freedom of expression, thereby violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The case arose when a Pickering, Ontario woman complained that her neighbour's "naturalistic garden" was really just a neglected garden.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITY:

A Canadian lawyer wrote about the case of a London, Ontario chiropractor who was forced by the Human Rights Commission to install a $20,000 ramp at his clinic, and pay $500 in damages to a wheelchair-bound woman who complained about being denied the doctor's services because she couldn't get into the building. She rejected his offer to treat her at home or at another accessible location, because she said those alternatives would make her feel stigmatized and undignified. The doctor was found guilty of discrimination. The lawyer, writing in Fraser Forum magazine, argues that Ontario's Human Rights Code treats consumers and business people differently. Consumers she says can't be discriminated against on the grounds of race, sex, or handicap, for example, by anyone providing services, goods, facilities, or accomodation. But, she argues that goods and services providers have no such rights; they can be discriminated against freely. Restaurateurs for example can't claim "systematic discriminatin:" the Human Rights Commission won't force people to eat their "fair share" of, say, Chinese food. Thus, the Human Rights Code actually imposes a form of involuntary servitude on certain members of society. Set up a debate on this issue.