Linking Societal Injustice and Legalization: Potential of Canadian Class Actions in Addressing International Human Rights Violations Committed by Canadian Corporations Abroad
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Class actions are increasingly being used in some countries’ jurisdictions as a vehicle to address human rights violations committed by corporations abroad, including violations of workers’ rights and harm of foreign nationals. Class actions in Canada, however, provide limited redress in such circumstances. Without such redress in Canada, it will remain impossible to hold transnational corporations incorporated in Canada accountable for the violation of international treaties or Customary International Law. In the first part of this paper I outline the current state of international human rights class actions in Canada. After discussing two cases that provide insight into the limitations of class actions as a mechanism for addressing human rights violations abroad, I discuss the potential causes of those limitations: jurisdictional issues, the corporate veil, and remedies. I argue that while human rights class actions are particularly unattractive to class counsel because of the aforementioned limitations, Canadian class actions regimes can be altered to address this shortfall and better assist those seeking justice for human rights violations abroad. The Canadian class actions regime and broader legal system can better provide access to justice for people who have experienced human rights violations abroad — through law reform that facilitates human rights cases coming before Canadian courts, amendments to current class actions legislation, and institutional changes. This paper explores how class actions can be part of the pursuit to hold accountable the entities committing human rights violations abroad.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".