The Symbiotic Relationship Between Social Movements and Public Interest Litigation: A Case Study of the I am a Witness Campaign and the Human Rights Complaint of 165,000 First Nations Kids
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“This decision concerns children.” That is the first sentence of the historic decision released by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (“CHRT” or “Tribunal”) on January 26, 2016 relating to a human rights complaint filed by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada (“Caring Society”) and the Assembly of First Nations (“AFN”) regarding Canada’s failure to properly implement Jordan’s Principle (a mechanism to ensure equal access to government services) and its provision of flawed and inequitable child welfare services to over 165 000 First Nations children. First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada et al. v. Canada (Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada) is a seminal case in many respects and its rich contribution to various areas of law will surely be discussed for years to come. The focus of this paper, however, will be the I am a Witness Campaign. Launched in 2008, the public education campaign accompanying the case informed interested individuals about the progress of the case. What began as an education tool soon metamorphosed into a social movement consisting of solidarity walks, letter writing and bear hugging campaigns, petitions, and social media activism. At the time of writing, 15,963 individuals or organisations had signed up to support the campaign. This paper will examine the symbiotic relation between the I am a Witness Campaign and the litigation of the historic human rights complaint. In particular, I will discuss how the letters of supporters were used in support of the decision to allow never before television access to the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network in the hearing room and the presence of the children throughout the 72 day hearing was a factor in the moral and legal victory of the complainants that is rooted in the best interests of the child.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".