Foreign Classes Bringing Canadian Actions: Lessons from the Case Against Anvil Mining Limited
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In October 2004, the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (known in the DCR as the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo, or FARDC) conducted anti-insurgency operations in the town of Kilwa, Katanga province, DRC. Along the way, with logistical support from Anvil Mining Limited, a Canadian-Australian transnational corporation, the FARDC committed countless atrocities against the innocent civilian townspeople in Kilwa. Eight years later, the Kilwa victims’ long road to justice came to a disappointing end at the doorstep of the Supreme Court of Canada. The legal struggle of the proposed Kilwa class through the Quebec courts raises several interesting questions about the feasibility of a foreign class bringing an action against defendants in Canadian courts. Focusing on Quebec and Ontario, this paper aims to provide some answers to these important questions. The purposes of class proceedings and rules regarding class certification appear supportive of the notion of a foreign class settling an international dispute in Canada. Yet, these cases, such as the one against Anvil Mining Limited, face steep obstacles in the civil and common law rules of jurisdiction. The Civil Code of Quebec and the common law “real and substantial connection” test do not absolutely foreclose foreign classes from bringing actions in Canada, but they do strictly regulate the situations in which Quebec or Ontario authorities can assume jurisdiction to hear a case. The complementary doctrines of forum non conveniens and forum of necessity become especially relevant in the context of foreign class actions for atrocities committed abroad. This paper is intended as an overview of these important issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".