Isolation and Human Rights: Arendt and the Charter at Forty

Abstract

Great excitement greeted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms because it promised to deliver constitutionally enshrined equality rights (among other things) to all Canadian citizens. Those who had been formerly excluded from full civil and social participation because of social inequalities, prejudice, and bias would now be included in a new social compact. And, as the title of the conference that inspired this paper suggests, that promise was also that those isolated as a result of those exclusions, no longer would be.