Prime Minister Mark Carney’s pick for Canada’s next governor general, former Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour, has a very accomplished backstory — including one phase of her life that was even dramatized in film.
Arbour was appointed chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda at The Hague, Netherlands, in 1996, and she set a precedent in 1999 by indicting then-Yugoslav and former-Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic for alleged war crimes related to the mass expulsion of 800,000 Kosovo Albanians, as well as the killings of hundreds of men, women and children and the sexual assaults of many ethnic Albanian women.
No sitting head of state had ever been indicted before by an international court.
Milosevic was eventually arrested in 2001 and extradited to The Hague to face trial. He died in custody in March 2006, prior to a verdict in the case.
This time in Arbour’s career was dramatized in The Hunt for Justice, a made-for-TV film released in Canada by CTV in 2006, nine years after her appointment and one year before the trial ended with Milosevic’s death from a heart attack while in detention.
Canadian actor Wendy Crewson played the part of Arbour.
In a 2006 interview with the Toronto Star, Arbour revealed her deep disappointment with the death of Milosevic, as it prematurely ended the war crimes trial without a full assessment of the evidence.
“You can’t help but feel cheated,” she said.
In the same interview, Arbour reacted to the film with a mix of cringing embarrassment and amazement. Some scenes depicted her memories of flying to mass grave sites with impressive accuracy, she said, while other scenes depicted fictional events that would have violated legal protocols.
“The idea that a prosecutor would bring an indictment to a judge — who would then propose a bottle of champagne — ahh! I wanted to die,” she said. “Let’s be very clear. This is a piece of fiction. This is not a documentary. There is a difference between reality and truth.”
The film’s director, Charles Binamé, described Arbour as a paragon of integrity in a 2006 Montreal Gazette article chronicling Binamé’s recent film projects.
“She’s extremely humble and grounded. ‘Integrity’ might be a word that was invented for her,” he said.
The Gazette reviewed the film as thoughtful and human-centred, praising its narrative focus through the eyes of Arbour’s translator, Pasko (played by Croation-born German Stipe Erceg), as well as Crewson’s soulful performance as Arbour.
Prior to her role at the International Criminal Tribunal, Arbour had served as head of a federal Commission of Inquiry to investigate prisoner abuse at the Prison for Women in Kingston, producing a final report formally titled the Commission of Inquiry into certain events at the Prison for Women in Kingston. It was dubbed the Arbour Report.
The findings in the report prompted the commissioner of Corrections Services Canada John Edwards to immediately resign and all new women’s prisons in the country to use female-only staff.
In May 1990, Arbour was appointed by then-prime minister Jean Chrétien to Canada’s Supreme Court. She served on the country’s top court until 2004, when she became United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, a post Arbour held until 2008.
She garnered criticism in 2008 from then- prime minister Stephen Harper’s Coservative government after she stated that Israeli commanders had courted war crimes in the conflict with Lebanon in 2006.
‘The idea that a prosecutor would bring an indictment to a judge — who would then propose a bottle of champagne — ahh! I wanted to die.’
— Louise Arbour, commenting in 2006 on a scene from the film Hunt for Justice
Harper’s spokesman described the government as having not “always agreed to with the positions she has taken,” according to UN Watch.
Most recently, Arbour was appointed in 2021 by the Liberal government of former prime minister Justin Trudeau to investigate how the Canadian military handles sexual assault and harassment. She recommended that a civilian court handle sexual assault allegations rather than the military itself, one of the highlights in a report by Arbour that produced 48 recommendations.
During the May 5 announcement of her appointment to become Canada’s 31st governor general, Arbour emphasized national unity.
“We live in a country where there’s a great space for (the) expression of contrary views,” said Arbour, who is scheduled to be sworn in next month. “I have immense respect for that process … I will reach out to anybody who wishes to engage with me, to debate, to discuss. I will listen … I will engage.”
