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The Supreme Court of Canada favours a flexible conception of federalism, in accordance with the principles of cooperative federalism, coordinated interpretation of powers and subsidiarity. It generally favours the simultaneous application of validly enacted legislation by Parliament and the provinces. There are cases where, however, the Court considers that the powers of one level of government must be protected against encroachment by the other. The doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity and federal paramountcy addresses this type of situation. The first makes it impossible to apply a provincial law that seriously impairs the essential content of a federal head of power. The second may render inoperative a provincial law that contradicts the letter or the spirit of a federal law. The Supreme Court has repeatedly pointed out that the doctrines of interjurisdictional immunity and federal paramountcy do not represent the mainstream of Canadian constitutional law, since they have the serious effect of rendering validly adopted provincial laws ineffective. The criteria for finding an impairment with the core of a federal head of power or an actual conflict of laws are therefore fairly strict. As we will see in this text, the recent jurisprudence of Canadian courts tends, on the contrary, to broaden these doctrines in favour of a more rigid conception of federalism favouring enclaves around federal head of powers over transportation, to the detriment of provincial and municipal jurisdictions on the environment and land use planning. While the Supreme Court condemned the asymmetrical application of these doctrines in the Canadian Western Bank case in 2007, some judges may already be returning to a more centralized approach as long as federal transportation are at issue in a litigation.

Keywords: Fédéralisme, partage des compétences, environnement, aménagement du territoire, transports fédéraux, doctrine de l'exclusivité, doctrine de la prépondérance fédérale, Federalism, division of powers, environment, land use planning, federal transportation, interjurisdictional immunity doctrine, doctrine of federal paramountcy

The concept of crimes against humanity has evolved slowly under international law. Its roots are in jus gentium. Subsequently, it evolved through the development of the “laws of war” which are also known as humanitarian law. After the Second World War, the first normative codification of this concept was elaborated upon and applied in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.We argue that, despite the International Military Tribunal's reluctance to recognize the independent nature of crimes against humanity (as compared with war crimes and crimes against peace) post war international law increasingly endorses its generic and autonomous nature.Canadian law provides an eloquent example of the state practice of domestic law sanctioning against this international offence. There is no doubt that the law applicable in R. c. Finta assigns to the legal concept of crimes against humanity the status that it ought to have occupied under international criminal law ever since Nuremberg.However, if one accepts that such crimes arise from international law, their sanction should logically be administered by an international law entity. Will we ever see an international permanent tribunal sanction crimes against humanity in a universal manner?

This article aims to demonstrate that despite the international community's best efforts to eradicate slavery and slavery-like practices, such as forced labour, these phenomenons are still on the rise today. It will be shown that sweatshop conditions, in the worst of cases, fit the definition of modern forms of slavery and slavery-like practices. Moreover, it will be demonstrated that voluntary measures adopted by multinational corporations are insufficient and more coercive measures need to be taken. Indeed, as submitting workers to sweatshop conditions can amount to the committing of an international crime, corporations and Corporate Executive Officers engaging in these practices should be prosecuted for doing so. This article seeks to demonstrate that the eradication of sweatshops could be achieved by using concepts developed by international criminal law. Additionally, other countries could adopt national measures (like the U.S.A.'s ATCA and RICO) in order to avoid problems raised by corporate structure, as well as adequately compensate the victims of sweatshop labour.

In his 1963 article, Professor Jacques-Yvan Morin outlined the philosophical foundations for a prospective Quebec Charter of Rights. Building on these insights, this research examines the contemporary philosophical and legal theories that have emerged since Morin's seminal work and the adoption of the Quebec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. The first part draws on the philosophy of law to explore the notions of liberalism and pluralism, the principles elaborated by the courts, and the hypothesis of the ethnicization of law. The second part presents, with regard to legal theory, analyses of legal pluralism and soft law, legal pragmatism and the requisite reflexivity, and the educational and promotional functions of the Commission. To establish the contemporary philosophical and theoretical foundations of Charter rights, the present-day works of numerous Quebec Charter experts are referenced.

On March 2013, a new chapter was written in Guatemala's struggle for transitional justice with the beginning of the trial of former chief of State and military general Efrain Ríos Montt, accused of having orchestrated genocide and crimes against humanity during his 1982-1983 rule. Until recently, Guatemala was one of the last Latin-American states to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). However, with more than 200 000 victims during Guatemala's 36 years internal armed conflict (1960-1996) and the conclusions of an UN-backed truth commission in 1999, main culprits suspected of those atrocities had never been brought to justice. Yet, post-conflict Guatemala is characterized by a culture of impunity and a generalized distrust towards political and judicial institutions. How can we explain recent shifts in Guatemalan politics initiated by new president, Otto Pérez Molina, another former military facing allegations of human rights abuses? After detailing the limits of the numerous international interventions in post-conflict Guatemala, this article seeks to illustrate the innovative role of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and its complementarity with the ICC. It will be argued that through CICIG's work, a political change has been occurring in Guatemala, a sine qua non condition for prosecution of former military officers. Recent events that took place between 2012 and 2013 seem to support our hypothesis.

This article mainly aims at providing a critical analysis of the ideas that are presented in the three books surveyed. It will allow the author to propose some reflections on certain issues, in particular on indeterminacy in law, human rights “policy” as well as the enfranchising potential of international law. However, the survey of those three books is also a pretence for a broader analysis of those new critical approaches and to put them back in the context of the critical studies movement that has been prevalent in international law during the course of the last century. What this article tries to demonstrate, is that those new approaches are set apart by the fact that they provide both an epistemological and a normative critique to the dominant approaches in international law, which was not the case for the previous critical approaches.

This article examines the Ursuline community in Bordeaux, France between 1606 and 1625. It integrates the community’s social and institutional history with an analysis of their convent’s architecture and devotional practices, an approach that has not until now been taken for women’s teaching orders in France. In 1608 the Ursulines shifted from a secular congregation to a formal religious order. They changed in reaction to community criticism as well as in response to the need for a quiet space in which to practise their religious devotions. After receiving official papal approval in 1618, they decorated their chapel and wrote devotional guides. An examination of their chapel as a public representation of the community’s identity, and of their guides, illustrates the adjustments the Ursulines underwent and the institutionalization of their devotional practices. These transformations enabled the Ursulines to flourish and to play a central role in Catholic reform in Bordeaux and its surrounding regions.

This paper attempts to interpret the research of identity experienced by some members of the Italian community of Montreal, defined as parents and children of the post World War II period. The author proposes a detour, going through the migration project of the parents, its modifications and the links it shows with the migrations of the beginning of the century, in order to show how the ethnic experience in the receiving society can be shaped by the aspirations responsible for the crossing of the ocean. Migrations thus looks as a complex and contradictory phenomenon which includes that of ethnicity and which conditions the relations that tie and oppose both national identity and local identity.

"Brain death" was institutionalized 25 years ago primarily to make organs "harvested" from brain dead bodies on an artificial ventilator available for transplant. Doubts exist as to whether the donors used in the first heart transplants conducted in South Africa in 1967, and in Japan in 1968, were dead. Reaction to these two experiments was remarkably different. In Japan the surgeon was arrested for murder, a national debate about brain death continues today, and transplants from brain dead bodies have only been made permissible since June 1997. This debate contrasts with that in North America, where transplant technology is routinized and an organ "shortage" is recognized. In Japan the argument is politicized, focuses on death, and draws on cultural knowledge about Self and Other; Japan and the West; harmony and individualism; tradition and modernity / postmodernity. North American discussion focuses on saving lives; making death meaningful; remaking death yet again; and assumes technology to be culturally and politically autonomous. These respective debates are discussed using textual analysis and the results of interviews with philosophers, physicians, and nurses in both cultural settings. An effort is made to suggest why the Japanese debate is central in constituting contemporary cultural identity, whereas the North American debate is of little public interest. The significance for anthropology of the hybrid status of brain dead bodies and organ recipients together with the national and global circulation and commodification of bodies and body parts associated with this technology is considered.

Through its responses to poverty, the legislator breaks with the rights guaranteed in the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedom, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that it has itself ratified. The analysis of welfare programs adopted successively for more than 50 years attest to this. By moving from an approach initially premised on the principle of a right to welfare to that of social assistance “activation,” which is based on employability, sanctions and conditionality, welfare programs seem more anchored in neoliberal values than in the rights of people living in poverty. This large gap between welfare and rights was, however, validated by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2002, in the Gosselin case. On this occasion, the Court refrained from setting parameters and therefore left the field open to the legislator. These respective positions of the legislative and judicial powers, analyzed here through the prism of a shared responsibility with respect to the protection and promotion of constitutional rights, have the effect of confining people living in poverty in a space outside rights, revealing a flaw in constitutionalism. This situation brings to light the stark reality that refuse to recognize those who continue to believe that it is the sole responsibility of the legislator to implement social rights, such as the right to an adequate standard of living : the legislative power is not a vector for the effectiveness of the rights of people living in poverty.

Keywords: Pauvreté, droits de la personne, pouvoir législatif, pouvoir judiciaire, néolibéralisme, Poverty, human rights, legislative power, judiciary power, neoliberalism