Rosalie Silberman Abella is the first Jewish woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. At the IBA Annual Conference 2025, she reflected on the legacy of the Nuremberg trials and the importance of protecting justice.

What an incredible honour, to be the recipient of the Benjamin Ferencz Rule of Law Lifetime Achievement Award. Ben Ferencz was a legend. Harvard Law School graduate, chief prosecutor at the age of 27 at the Nuremberg trials, a scholar, an international lawyer, an architect of the International Criminal Court and a mensch. He not only believed in world peace, he spent his life trying to figure out how to make it happen. And it was all because he witnessed firsthand the atrocities of Buchenwald and the other concentration camps that he helped liberate.

So having my name linked with Ben Ferencz, with the rule of law and with the International Bar Association not only brings all of the pieces of my life together, it explains it. [It] links me with the aspirational international collaboration of law, lawyers and judges at Nuremberg. Why? My life's journey started with the injustices revealed at Nuremberg. Who I am, what I am, what I believe in [and] what I hope for all started there. In honour of the legacy of Ben Ferencz, this speech is a tribute to the role of law, the rule of law and the inspirational lawyers and judges who promoted and protected it at Nuremberg.

I graduated from the University of Toronto Law School in 1970 and have been proud every single day of being a lawyer. To me, lawyers are democracy's warriors because lawyers represent the best hope that justice will be protected. We are asked every day and will always be asked to help other individuals make choices about how to conduct themselves and what to think about in considering their options. We are asked to explain the legal context, the possible consequences, the pros and cons and the likelihood of success.

This takes not only a deep understanding of law and laws, it takes a deep understanding of how to apply them. In other words, it takes wisdom. And wisdom, to me, is the thoughtful application of facts to people, best developed with humility and delivered in courage. In other words, our profession obliges us to apply our wisdom with humility and courage not just in the context of a particular client or case, but in furtherance of the kind of professional legacy we want to donate to history.

This month is the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials, where Ben Ferencz played such a crucial role. Those trials, along with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, were the phoenixes that rose from the ashes of Auschwitz and represented the magnificent global consensus that there were to be no more human rights abuses. They were our global commitment that what happened to Jews [in the Second World War] would never happen again to anyone. Nuremberg was the legal engine that exposed, held accountable and defined the bedrock principles for a future in which justice would be protected and directed by a new global legal regime.

The world was supposed to learn three lessons from Nuremberg. One, indifference is injustice's incubator. Two, it's not just what you stand for, it's what you stand up for. And three, we must never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable. To me, this is not just theory. Three [survivors of the Holocaust] were my parents and grandmother.

My father graduated with a master’s in law from the Jagiellonian University Law School in Kraków. He was scheduled to take his examination to qualify as a judge in October 1939. Instead, on 3 September 1939, the day my parents got married in Poland, the Second World War officially started. My parents spent over three years in concentration camps. Their two-and-a-half-year-old son – my brother – and my father's parents and three younger brothers were all killed at Treblinka.

I never heard him complain about not being able to practise his profession. He just felt so lucky to be in a country where his family would be safe. But when I heard the story, one of my earliest memories in Canada, that was the moment I decided to be a lawyer. I was four years old. I had no idea what it meant to be lawyer, but it didn't matter. I felt that if he couldn't be what he wanted to be, then I would be, and I never changed my mind.

My parents saw Canada as a country that respected their commitment to rebuilding a joyful family, respected their right to retain in demonstrable pride the religious identity that had attracted such brutality in Europe and respected their hopes that life in Canada would provide peace, safety and fairness, and how right they were. Canada took one generation's European horror story and turned it into another generation's fairy tale.

The lack of complaint in my home or lament growing up was, as I look back, extraordinary. No bitterness, no anger, no fear. Only hope. But while my parents never forgot how lucky they were to be able to restart their lives in a vibrant democracy, neither did they ever forget why they had to, and neither should we. They had to because the rule of law turned into the law of injustice, which is what Nuremberg confronted.

I never asked my parents if they took any comfort from the Nuremberg trials. I have no idea if they got any consolation from the convictions of dozens of the worst offenders. But of this, I am very sure. They would have preferred by far that the sense of outrage that inspired the Allies to establish the Military Tribunal of Nuremberg had been aroused many years earlier, before the events that led to Nuremberg ever took place.

But there was no such world reaction. By the time [the Second World War] officially started, it was too late. Millions of lives were lost because no one was offended enough by the systematic destruction of every conceivable right for Jews in Germany that they felt the need for any form of response. And today, clearly, we still have not learned the most important lesson we were supposed to learn from the Holocaust and Nuremberg: to try to prevent the abuses in the first place.

I think lawyers like us have a tendency to take some comfort, properly so, in the possibility of subsequent judicial reckoning, such as occurred at Nuremberg. But is subsequent justice really an adequate substitute for justice?

I don't for one moment want to suggest that the Nuremberg trials weren't important. Of course they were. They were a crucial and heroic attempt to hold the unimaginably guilty to judicial account and they showed the world the banality of evil and the evil of indifference. But at the moment, the gap between the values the international community articulates and the values it enforces is so wide that almost any country that wants to can push its abuses through it. No national abuser seems to worry whether there will be a Nuremberg trial later because usually there isn't.

But I worry that the ideals of fairness and justice that guided me all my life are under global siege. We may have had the rule of law, but did we have the rule of justice? We need a just rule of law, not just the rule of law. Laws and rules are important, but of what value are they if they drift or stagnate in a sea of noncompliance?

Too often, law and justice are in a dysfunctional relationship. We're in a mean-spirited, moral free-for-all that puts us at the edge of a future unlike any I've seen in my lifetime. Anger triumphs over respect, petulance triumphs over dignity and injustice is tolerated and tolerance is not. We're forgetting our compassion and penalising the vulnerable in a world that was supposed to have learned the horrendous cost of discrimination in [the Second World War].

We need to put justice back in charge, and to do that we need to put compassion back in the service of law and law in the service of humanity. We need the rule of justice, not just the rule of law. What good is the rule law if there's no justice? And what's the point of lawyers?

That is why the lawyer in me is watching in heartbreak the cavalier disregard in so many parts of the world for rudimentary democratic norms, for settled expectations of decency and for human and civil rights. The lawyer in me who knew that before she was born, the world did nothing to speak out about the insidious and ultimately genocidal rise in antisemitism. The lawyer in me who revelled in the chance to grow up in a world whose moral guardrails were found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the lawyer in me who understood that experiencing the helpless vulnerability of being different obliged us to protect others who were different.

All this was my tutor. It drove everything I did and am. It's the way I pay tribute to the resilience of my parents and the other survivors, and it is the way I confront history. So, what do we do?

We need to stop yelling at each other and start listening. We need to reclaim ownership of our civility and humility. Reclaim ownership of our dignity. Reclaim ownership of our right to be different. And reclaim ownership of the liberal democratic values the Allies fought [in the Second World War] to protect. Above all, we need to replace global hate with global hope. Otherwise, there is no hope.

Democracy does not just depend on the will of the people, but on their humanity. Justice is of the people and for the people, and judges and lawyers must deliver it to them with courage and integrity. And if we judges and lawyers don't protect justice, then democracy doesn't have a chance.

My father died in March of 1970, a month before I finished law school. He never lived to see his inspiration take flight in his daughter, or in her two sons who followed in his footsteps and got their LLMs. But not before he taught me that being a lawyer was the noblest thing you could be, and that democracies and their laws represent the best possibility of justice.

A few years ago, my mother gave me some of his papers from Germany, and in them, I found the reason he always spoke so respectfully and appreciatively of the American justice system. The letters were from American lawyers, prosecutors and judges he'd worked with in the US zone in Stuttgart. They were warm, compassionate and encouraging letters, either recommending, appointing or qualifying my father for various legal roles in the court system the Americans had set up in Germany after the war.

One of the most powerful documents I found was written by my father when he was head of our displaced persons camp in Stuttgart where we had lived. It was his introduction of Eleanor Roosevelt when she came to visit our [camp] in 1948. He said, ‘we welcome you, Mrs Roosevelt, as the representative of a great nation whose victorious army liberated the remnants of European Jewry from death and so highly contributed to their moral and physical rehabilitation. We shall never forget that aid rendered by the American people and army. We are not in a position of showing you many assets. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future’.

As one of those children, I am here to tell you that the gift of justice is the gift that keeps right on giving. A gift that propelled me from a displaced persons camp in Germany to becoming the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court of Canada.

So, I stand before you not only as a proud and grateful Canadian woman who has spent her life marvelling at the opportunities she has been given by her beloved Canada, but as a proud and grateful lawyer who has had the great honour of being part of a truly noble profession committed to democracy, to rights and to justice.

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This is an abridged version of Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella’s speech. The filmed speech can be viewed in full here.