Anne Bayefsky


Anne Bayefsky is a human rights scholar and activist. She currently directs the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar. Her areas of expertise include international human rights law, equality rights, and constitutional human rights law.

Career

Bayefsky holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto and an M.Litt. from Oxford University. She has served as the director of York's Centre for Refugee Studies, project director for the university's Human Rights Treaty Study, member of Canadian delegations to international meetings, such as the UN Human Rights Commissions in 1993–1996, the UN General Assembly in 1984 and 1989, the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, and a delegate of the American Society of International Law to the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. She was a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute She was with different international delegations such as Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995 and Durban Racism Conference in 2001.
Currently, she is a member of the International Law Association Committee on International Human Rights Law and Practice, Editor-in-Chief of the series "Refugees and Human Rights," published by Martinus Nijhoff in The Hague, and editor of Eye on the UN. She also sits on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a non-profit thinktank focusing on issues of United States and Israel's national security.
Bayefsky has published extensively in the field of human rights, including a report with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2001 as well as the creation of bayefsky.com, a gateway to the United Nations' Human Rights Treaties aiming to enhance "the implementation of the human rights legal standards of the United Nations" on the basis that "Accessibility to UN human rights norms by individuals everywhere is fundamental to their successful realization."

Views

Bayefsky has argued that Ontario's policy of fully funding Roman Catholic schools, while denying full funding to other religious schools, is discriminatory.
She has also argued that Human Rights Watch "fanned the flames of racial intolerance" before the Durban Conference by facilitating the exclusion of Jewish representatives from an NGO caucus, later covering up its role in the affair, and misrepresenting the outcome to the media.
Bayefsky speaks out in defense of Israel. She was critical of "the Obama administration's response to Israel's announcement that it will continue to build new homes for its expanding population in disputed territory," calling it "hysterical," and asked, "Given that the United States is supposed to be committed to the parties determining ultimate legal ownership of the land in final status negotiations, what is going on?"
In 2014, Bayefsky created a short video for the educational website Prager University in which she criticizes the United Nations for its antagonism towards Israel.

Awards