By Cecilia Nasmith

The Politics of Human Rights is the topic of the next Northumberland Learning Connection on-line presentation, featuring the unique perspective of Irwin Cotler.

The speaker at the Feb. 17 session is an internationally recognized human-rights lawyer and activist, whose resume includes stints as former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, Emeritus Professor of Law at McGill University, chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights and Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism.

In his law career, he represented Cold War political prisoner Natan Sharansky, Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, Iranian cleric Ayatollah Boroujerdi and political prisoners Leopoldo Lopez of Venezuela and Nelson Mandela of South Africa.

His accolades include the Magnitsky Human Rights Award and Officer of the Order of Canada – the country's highest civilian award.

Since 2005, NLC – a registered charity – has been bringing speakers' series on topics of current interest – from geopolitics, history and literature to science and technology – to the Cobourg-Port Hope area since 2005. Their spring 2019 series on Newfoundland attracted record crowds, Their fall 2019 program on artificial intelligence saw many of its sessions sold out in advance.

COVID-19 scuttled their spring 2020 series on Alberta. NLC pivoted to individual on-line sessions, beginning with the session Animal Farm: An Alternate View of Pandemics by University of Guelph Professor Emeritus David Waltner-Toews.

Animal Farm was followed by a series of single sessions covering such topics as basic income, long-term care, China, rethinking growth and the environment.

Tickets for the Feb. 17 Irwin Cotler Zoom session are $10, available at the NLC website. The 7:30 p.m. Presentation will be prefaced by a slide show that begins at 7:20 p.m.

Purchasers will receive an e-mail that contains a link to the Zoom event 24 hours in advance.