Human rights
Human rights are one of the pillars of Pascale Fournier's work, and her commitment to them extends far beyond the classroom. A Full Professor at the Civil Law Section of the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Rights and Freedoms, she is also the Founding Director of the Observatory on Human Rights at the United Nations. Holder of the Research Chair in Legal Pluralism and Comparative Law from 2012 to 2018, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation from 2018 to 2023, and Commissioner with the Quebec Human Rights and Youth Rights Commission from 2015 to 2018, she has also taught at the State University of Haiti, the University for Peace in Costa Rica and the Women's Studies and Research Institute in Iran, and has advised the United Nations Development Programme. Wherever she works, she builds innovative partnerships, seeks her answers in the field, opens access to knowledge and to human rights, and mobilizes people and leadership in creative ways. And one conviction has never left her: the law must be measured by what it actually changes in the lives of the people it claims to protect.
The UN Human Rights Observatory
By founding the Observatory on Human Rights at the United Nations in 2024, Pascale Fournier and her team created something that existed nowhere else: a leadership space where students no longer simply study international mechanisms, but contribute to them directly.
An initiative of the Civil Law Section of the University of Ottawa, the Observatory sits at the intersection of academia, United Nations bodies and a constellation of professional communities: visual arts, film, journalism, the judiciary, non-governmental organizations, diplomacy, literature and politics. Its mission has three strands: to innovate in legal education by closing the gap between theory and practice, to empower the public through knowledge mobilization, and to contribute to social justice initiatives.
The Curriculum: "Piloting with Courage: Leadership and Human Rights"
Each year, the Observatory selects a cohort of twenty Leaders, exceptional undergraduate and graduate students, and offers them a leadership curriculum without equivalent. The program rests entirely on experiential learning and unfolds across three modules.
The first explores the roots of leadership: how understanding one's own values, beliefs and biases combines with emotional intelligence, empathy and integrity to form the foundation of any credible defence of human rights. The second addresses piloting across divides: trust, storytelling, and the capacity to hold respectful dialogue with opposing points of view. The third takes on systemic change: navigating power relations, influencing public policy, and recognizing that real progress requires collective action.
Training is delivered by Professor Pascale Fournier along with the Pilots and Collaborators, who take on an active mentorship role: they welcome the Leaders into their own professional networks and provide them with personalized training. Among them are three justices of the Supreme Court of Canada, seasoned journalists, artists, filmmakers, diplomats, international researchers and community-based practitioners.
Reports Presented Before the Treaty Bodies in Geneva
The heart of the program takes place in Geneva. There, the Leaders present their own research reports directly before United Nations treaty bodies, including the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, as well as before the Permanent Mission of Canada to the United Nations. "Students are not in a passive role: they are at once leaders, apprentice researchers and conduits for the transmission of knowledge," Pascale Fournier emphasizes. And on what the exercise demands of them: "It took boldness and a genuine willingness to create a global scientific diplomacy, to push the research forward and build lasting connections."
Knowledge Democratization Projects After Geneva
The journey does not end with the scholarly report. Each cohort must make its research accessible to the general public through documentaries, podcasts, media interviews, conferences or other creative projects. This is where the circle closes: knowledge produced for international institutions, then creatively democratized for the very people it concerns.
What this journey produces are jurists capable of thinking critically and collaboratively, of navigating vastly different systems (the university, the United Nations, the public sphere) and of orchestrating real change. It is the conviction that has driven Pascale Fournier from the beginning of her career, this time built into an institution.
Teaching in Haiti and Iran
In Tehran, in December 2003, Pascale Fournier taught a course in feminist studies as a visiting professor at the Women's Studies and Research Institute, a few months after presenting her work there on collective identity and Muslim women in the West. Teaching women's rights in that context means listening as much as transmitting, and the experience left a lasting mark on how she approaches equality.
In Port-au-Prince, in June 2007, she taught international gender law at the Faculty of Law and Economics of the State University of Haiti, which that same year awarded her its "Honour and Merit" distinction for teaching. Her stay extended to the Palais de Justice, where she spoke alongside the Secretary of State for Justice before the Haitian Women Jurists' Initiative Group and the Port-au-Prince Bar Association, on the discrimination Haitian women face and international women's rights law. Four years earlier, she had led a mission of Harvard students to Haitian elementary schools.
Both experiences answer a conviction that runs through her entire practice: human rights cannot be understood from a single perspective. They take on meaning through comparison, through the passage from one legal order to another, and through the voices of those who live the gap between the law as written and the law as applied. It is this conviction she went on to carry before the United Nations Development Programme, before the courts where she testified as an expert witness, and all the way into the founding of the Observatory on Human Rights at the United Nations.
