Eminent writer on human rights, war crimes, the rule of international law, post-conflict reconciliation, political issues.

Erna Paris has spoken and written widely on issues of truth and reconciliation commissions, war crimes and human rights, international criminal courts and the rule of international law, US post-9/11 foreign policy, and Canada's role internationally. She also has expertise on contemporary European history, with an emphasis on French history and politics and the history and sociology of the Jewish Diaspora.

Paris is an informed, well-spoken critic of international affairs. Regarding issues such as Guantanamo Bay, the possible trial of Omar Khadr, the imprisonment and torture of Maher Arar, security certificates, and secret rendition flights by the CIA, she says Canada has been following the lead of the U.S., a risky, unrealistic path to follow.

Although most Canadians continue to see their country as a world leader in global peace efforts and human rights, she believes that Canada is slipping. Canada needs to re-establish its reputation as a fair and just society that operates internationally with the tools of "soft power," which is its traditional strength.

Paris is the award-winning author of several books exploring themes of global politics, historical memory, and justice. In The End of Days: Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain, she examined the ways in which a nation's identity may be slowly redefined while the citizenry is barely aware of change. She has also written about historical shifts within the Zionist ideology in Israel and the consequences, and about the Canadian Jewish experience.

In her book The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America, Paris has published a groundbreaking investigation of contemporary global justice and its origins, the politics behind America's opposition to the creation of the International Criminal Court, and the important implications of this new tribunal for the twenty-first century.

In Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History Paris chronicled her journey over four continents into the shifting terrain of war and memory. Combining gripping storytelling with insight and sharp observation, she takes us to places of reckoning - be they courtrooms or concentration camps - and finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with the conflicts of our time: the aftermath of World War II in Japan, slavery in the U.S., apartheid in South Africa, and the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany and France.

An engaging speaker, political critic, justice analyst and informed peace advocate, Erna Paris pinpoints several emerging dilemmas of the twenty-first century.

• The Surprising Birth of the International Criminal Court: How the rebirth of international criminal tribunals, in combination with the emergence of a sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, opened new possibilities for the twenty-first century.
• Truth, Lies and History: The shifting terrain of war and memory and how nations have tried to deal with their difficult twentieth-century history.
• Truth and Reconciliation in Canada: What is the significance of Canada's apology to residential school survivors? What can we learn from the way other countries have handled truth and reconciliation commissions? What does it take to be successful?
• Do We Know Where We Are? Or Where We're Going? Charting Canada's course as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close. Are we on board the ship of state? Or not?
• Mirrors and Echoes: Tolerance and Tyranny in Fifteenth-Century Spain: How Spain, the most open, pluralist and tolerant nation of medieval Europe became the least tolerant with an Inquisition against so-called heretics and two major population expulsions - and the relevance of these events to our time.
• The Garden and the Gun: A Journey Inside Israel: Exploring the shifting ideologies of Israel from the liberal - nationalist idealism of the early settlers and the kibbutz movement to the parallel, but now religious - nationalist ideology of the settlers in the Occupied Territories.
• Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair: How France's sharp political divisions dating back to the Revolution of 1789 and myths about the Second World War French Resistance shaped the national response when Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was kidnapped in Bolivia, in 1983, and returned to France for trial.
• Jews: An Account of Their Experience in Canada. The political, cultural and social struggle of European Jews to adapt to their new home.

"In The Sun Climbs Slow Erna Paris describes, movingly and convincingly, the dawn of a new age of international law. There could be no better guide to the emerging world in which no guilty person, however powerful, can escape responsibility for acts of barbarism. Obligatory reading for the forward looking."
- John Polanyi, Nobel Laureate

"A superb work of history and thought. A brilliantly conceived quest… Long Shadows is simply first-rate writing… an intellectual triumph."
- Stan Persky, Vancouver Sun

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