Israel lobby pressures Univ of Toronto to rescind scholar hire
Lobby Watch 5 October 2020
A judge affiliated with a major Israel lobby group interfered in the hiring of the director of University of Toronto Law’s International Human Rights Program. (Ken Lund)
The University of Toronto has allegedly rescinded a job offer to a prominent human rights scholar after a sitting Canadian tax court judge complained about her research on Palestinian rights.
Justice David Spiro is a former board member of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the premier Zionist organization in Canada.
He is also a major donor to the university.
More than 1,400 human rights advocates, scholars and lawyers say that this is blatant censorship, a violation of academic freedom and dangerous acquiescence to a donor’s political agenda.
The letter calls on the university to reinstate the professor and investigate the judge’s conduct.
The university offered professor Valentina Azarova, a human rights scholar who has written about Israel’s violations of international law, to head the law school’s International Human Rights Program on 11 August.
She accepted the offer on 19 August, according to The Globe and Mail and members of the hiring committee.
In early September, the law school’s dean, Edward Iacobucci, killed the job offer and suspended the search for the human rights program’s director indefinitely.
Iacobucci and the university then denied that Azarova was hired in the first place. “We can confirm that no offer of employment was made to any candidate, and therefore, no offer was revoked,” the administration stated, adding that the faculty of the law school “canceled the search.”
But email records refute such claims.
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