Forget about quality of life or getting back to his roots, William Schabas moved to Ireland from Canada for one reason only - a job. Not just any job, mind. It was the chance to set up a centre for human rights that he was after. And he got it. He's been director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway, since January 2000. "It didn't have to be Ireland," he shrugs. "It could have been anywhere in the world. It was the job I wanted. It's fabulous to be able to start up a centre and it's a good time to be working in human rights in Ireland - post the Belfast Agreement." And yes, on a personal level, he's glad he and his Greek-Cypriot wife sold up in Montreal and built a house in Oughterard, and, no, he doesn't mind the weather.
NUI, Galway's new professor of human rights describes himself as "a real Canadian". He grew up in English-speaking Toronto but moved as a postgraduate student to Montreal, where he mostly lived and worked through French. "It is," he admits, " a bit unusual to do that."
Schabas practised as a lawyer at the Quebec Bar for 10 years before he "drifted into academic life". The practice was, he says, "run of the mill" but developed a speciality in human-rights cases. "They were big issues - which I dealt with at the micro-level of individual cases."
When he graduated from law school, he missed the academic life so much he enrolled on first a masters and then a PhD in human rights. With nowhere else to go, he applied for and got a teaching job at the University of Quebec, combining academia and practice for the four years before he was tenured.
By 1995, he was teaching full-time and had been appointed a part-time judge on Quebec's Human Right's Tribunal. He was also becoming active internationally and was involved in a number of human rights missions to Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Cambodia and South America. Schabas has written extensively on the abolition of capital punishment. Two months ago, the supreme court of Canada ruled that it is unconstitutional to extradite people to the US if they are subject to the death penalty there. "I participated in the case for Amnesty International and I'm thrilled they've won," he says. Other research interests include genocide and war crimes prosecutions by international tribunals.
His most recently published book - Genocide in International Law (Cambridge University Press) came out last autumn. A new book, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, is due shortly. These days, being based in Galway and researching international human rights issues poses no problems, Schabas says. "Ten years ago, the biggest headache would have been developing a library and obtaining resource material. Now you can get everything via the Internet. "The documents are mostly judgments of courts of human rights - the more recent the better. The Commission of Human Rights meets every year in Geneva. Six years ago, you'd hear rumours of what was going on and a year later you'd get an enormous box of papers, with no index or table of contents. You'd just have to plough through it. Nowadays, they publish the documents on the Internet on the day of issue and you can use key words to access the information. The Internet has transformed everything." Galway's human-rights centre has been engaged in teaching, research, advocacy and community outreach. The new director is thrilled with its location - in a fine early 19th century building - a former fever hospital on Earl's Island opposite Galway Cathedral.
When Schabas arrived in Galway, he hit the ground running. "I arrived in January, opened the centre in February and by March had advertised our master's programme (LLM in international in human rights law). By May we'd had 100 applications, of whom 30 were admitted." The breakneck speed was essential. "It was important to get the LLM and PhD programmes up and running. It's a chicken and egg situation: if you want to do research you need a pool of master's and doctoral students to draw on." Two thirds of the master's students are Irish - some new graduates, others professionals requiring human-rights training. Interestingly, you don't need an undergraduate law degree to take the Galway master's in human rights law. "It's an unusual approach but I believe in it very strongly," Schabas says. Many people work in the field of human rights without a legal training. In the past, if they'd wanted to study human-rights law they'd have to take an undergraduate law degree and therefor cover a range of unnecessary areas. Conversely, people who have trained as lawyers may never have studied human-rights law. The master's students come from a range of backgrounds, with a range of skills. "It's not an uneven playing field," Schabas stresses. "You can't say that one person is better than another. There's a space that neither group has a monopoly on and this course caters to that space."
The development of a postgraduate human-rights course at Galway comes at a good time. Schabas points to the huge growth in the number of jobs in the field of human rights. The establishment of the UN High Commission for Human Rights has resulted in the creation of thousands of jobs, he says. Together, the Rwandan and Bosnian war crimes tribunals have a staff of 2,000.
Recently, the centre has received approval for an EUfunded project to promote human-rights treaties - the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - in China. "The centre is to co-ordinate a network of 15 human-rights centres and institutions - one in each member state - with partners in China," Schabas explains. The secretariat will be based in Galway.
The centre has also applied for HEA (PRTLI) funding for a major interdisciplinary research project in the fields of disability, conflict resolution and prevention, and vulnerable groups including refugees, ethnic minorities and Travellers. Meanwhile, Schabas and his three academic staff are currently developing a master's programme in peace-keeping studies and planning a number of summer schools.
