Louise Arbour
Louise Arbour
Introduction to Louise Arbour
Louise Arbour, born in 1947, Canadian jurist and puisne (associate) justice of the Supreme Court of Canada (1999-2004).
Arbour was born in Montréal, Québec, and attended the University of Montréal, where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1967 and a law degree in 1970. She clerked for Supreme Court justice Louis-Philippe Pigeon from 1971 to 1972, and she was admitted to the bar in both Québec and Ontario. From 1974 to 1987 she taught at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto. She was appointed to the High Court of Ontario in 1987 and to the Court of Appeal for Ontario in 1990. One of her major decisions while serving on the Court of Appeal was Eaton v. Brant (1995), in which she ruled that a severely disabled child could not be excluded from regular classes because of her disability (a decision that was later overturned by the Supreme Court).
In 1995 Arbour was appointed to a commission of inquiry investigating conditions at the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. The commission recommended that the prisoners be compensated for the abusive treatment they suffered at the prison. The following year she moved to The Hague, Netherlands, to become chief prosecutor for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia (see War Crimes Trials). In this position she became internationally known for her aggressive indictments of high-ranking officials such as Yugoslav president Slobodan Milo_evi_. She left the tribunals and returned to Canada in 1999 when Prime Minister Jean Chrétien named her to the Supreme Court. Arbour retired in 2004.” (1)