Top judge takes aim at populism

independent adjudicators like the press and the courts,” sparking a round of applause.

The honorary degree was the latest in a string of honours for Abella, who was named global jurist of the year by the law school at Northwestern University in Chicago, Ill., in January, and last year became the first Canadian woman to receive an honorary degree from Yale University.

The speech Sunday brought Abella to tears at points as she linked her personal history to contemporary events.

Her parents spent three years in Nazi concentration camps. Her father was the only member of his family to survive. The couple’s two-year-old son also died in the camps.

Abella was born July 1, 1946, in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, where her father, a lawyer, worked with American officials on legal services for displaced persons in the Allied zone of southwest Germany.

After the family immigrated to Canada, her father was told that non-citizens could not be lawyers. Abella was four years old at the time. She said it was at that moment she decided to become a lawyer.

Her father died a month before she graduated from law school.

Abella went on to become the first Jewish female on the Supreme Court, and headed a 1984 commission on employment equity.

In her keynote address, Abella invoked the memory of the Holocaust and said the mantra of “never again” had turned into “again and again” in today’s political climate.

“My life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, no justice, and all because we were Jewish,” Abella told the graduates.

“We have a particular duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents, a world where all children — regardless of race, colour, religion, or gender — can wear their identities with dignity, with pride, and in peace.”