Knocking on a Locked Door: Assessing Canada’s Response to Attacks Against Human Rights Defenders
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract For over two decades, Canadian corporations have been the subject of severe allegations of human rights and environmental violations related to the forced imposition of their operations abroad. Despite the growing consensus within the literature and international governance community that Canadian corporations—especially within the extractive sector—are serial perpetrators of grave human rights violations and despite Canada’s international legal obligations, at present there are very little ‘hard law’ mechanisms available to hold corporations to account. Whereas much literature has been dedicated to how Canadian corporations are facilitated by advocacy and lobbying efforts at the level of Canadian embassies in home-state-countries, much less studied is how these same state actors work towards protecting and preventing human rights defenders from harm. In this article we critically analyse the implementation of the Canadian government’s Voices at Risk guidelines (2016) from the perspective of two Canadian human rights advocacy Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) supporting communities in Guatemala, drawing from email and verbal communications as well as Access to Information Requests from 2016 to 2021 regarding the Escobal mine. We assess the usefulness of advocacy at the level of embassies as a way of protecting defenders and demonstrate that, in our experience, calls for support to defenders were ignored. We argue that, within the context of foreign policy which prioritizes trade and investment over all other government policies and wherein corporate violence is met with impunity, current Canadian policies aimed at protecting human rights defenders are essentially useless as an advocacy strategy.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it