TORONTO, September 12, 2003 -- York University professor of philosophy Howard Adelman has recently commented on the federal government’s terrorism probe of a group of Pakistanis arrested in Canada. He points out that this is the first real test of the government’s new immigration provision that permits the state to act on "reasonable suspicion" of a security breach rather than on fact.
"Most laws are written about what you do, not about what you might do," notes Adelman, an internationally respected scholar on the subject of refugee and immigration policy and ethics, and founder of York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies.
Adelman is currently a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Centre for International and Regional Studies. He has been active as a public intellectual throughout his career, supporting journalists with scholarly background and advising government on key policy issues in his field. He will be honoured on the occasion of his retirement from teaching, in a conference at York University Sept. 18-19 entitled The Academic as Public Intellectual: Responsibility and the Public Sphere. Adelman says it is important that scholars publicly critique poor quality journalistic work that is based more on opinion than on fact.
The conference will assemble distinguished international scholars in the fields of immigration and refugee studies, ethics, law, and human rights, including Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., one of the foremost experts on immigration policy in the United States, and Astri Suhrke from the Christian Michelson Institute, Bergen, Norway, co-author with Adelman of the first study of the role of the international community in the Rwandan genocide. Adelman will present his critique of three recent journalistic works on public policy. The conference takes place in McLaughlin Junior Common Room. For details check the Web site at www.yorku.ca/ycpe/events.
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Professor Adelman can be reached in Toronto at 416-533-5012, and at Princeton at 601-258-8256.
For further information, please contact:
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Susan Bigelow |
David Fuller |
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