Feed Your Mind Talk: Can an Innovative Court Promote the Right to Health?

Thu. Feb. 12 01:30 PM - Thu. Feb. 12 02:30 PM
Contact: Dr. Kristi Kenyon- kr.kenyon@uwinnipeg.ca
Location: 1MS25, Global College

Join us for the next talk in our Feed Your Mind Lecture Series!

Dr. Regiane Garcia will be presenting a talk entitled "Can an Innovative Court Promote the Right to Health?: The case of Downtown Community Court in Vancouver."

We rarely look to criminal courts to advance the right to health. Yet in Vancouver’s Downtown Community Court (DCC), judges, prosecutors and defence lawyers are trying to do just that. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, this talk discusses how the DCC’s institutional design enables new pathways for advancing social rights, particularly the right to health, from within the criminal justice system.

The DCC disrupts the usual divide between punishment and care, and reveals how legal actors are beginning to treat the court as a site of health governance rather than solely crime control. The ultimate goal of this talk is to open a conversation about how the DCC model might inform efforts in other jurisdictions to integrate health rights into criminal justice institutions.

About the Speaker

Dr. Regiane Garcia is a legal scholar employing qualitative and empirical legal methods to examine how legal and institutional designs can support more equitable, rights-based approaches to health. She holds a PhD in Law from UBC and currently serves as a Senior Policy Analyst with the B.C. Ministry of Health and a Senior Research Associate at Simon Fraser University. She serves as an adjunct professor in Global College’s Human Rights program.

A pizza lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Dr. Kristi Kenyon at kr.kenyon@uwinnipeg.ca.