CBC Massey Lecture Launch with Alex Neve

The Massey Lectures are co-sponsored by CBC Radio, House of Anansi Press, and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The series was created in honour of the Right Honourable Vincent Massey, former Governor General of Canada, and was inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time.

The 2025 CBC Massey Lectures, Universal Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World by Professor Alex Neve will take place across Canada in the months of September and October 2025, with a public session at Koerner Hall in Toronto on Friday, September 19, 2025.

To Alex Neve, the core promise behind human rights is that they are applied universally: to everyone, everywhere, at all times, without exception. But in this year’s Massey Lectures, he argues that while universality is the noblest promise we can afford our fellow human beings, it’s also the area where we have most gravely failed.

“I think everyone would acknowledge and recognize we live in a world where human rights are not at all delivered and enjoyed universally. So it gives us a chance to explore what the promise is all about, but also where we have come up so terribly short,” Neve told IDEAS’ Tom Howell. 

The Scheduled Tour Dates are as follows:

Thursday, September 18: CBC Massey Lectures Launch at Massey College in the Junior Common Room

Lecture 1: Sept. 19, Koerner Hall, Toronto.

Lecture 2: Sept. 25, York Theatre, Vancouver.

Lecture 3: Oct. 1, Horowitz Centre, Edmonton.

Lecture 4: Oct. 15, Lawrence O’Brien Centre, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L.

Lecture 5: Oct. 30, Babs Asper Theatre, Ottawa.

About the Lecturer:

Alex Neve is a human rights lawyer and served as Secretary-General of Amnesty International Canada from 2000 to 2020. His Massey Lectures, titled Universal: Renewing Human Rights in a Fractured World, follows in the tradition of lecturers that includes Tanya Talaga, Margaret Atwood and Martin Luther King Jr. The lectures will also be released as a book, published by House of Anansi Press, in September.

The five-part series will also mark the 60th anniversary of CBC Radio’s IDEAS, which first aired on Oct. 25, 1965.

To read more about Alex Neve click here to read the newly released CBC article.