Place-Based Teaching of IHL: Field-Notes from Atlantic Canada

[David Matyas (PhD – Cantab) is an assistant professor at the University of New Brunswick Faculty of Law, where he teaches IHL, the law of disasters and emergencies, and tort law]

On May 12, 1940, an English police officer knocks on the door of the Fell family residence in County Durham. The officer is responding to orders to intern every German and Austrian national between the ages of 16 and 70 living where Nazi paratroopers risk landing. Inside the house is Fred Kaufman — a 16-year-old Jewish boy who escaped Austria aboard the Kindertransport. The officer is apologetic, telling Kaufman to pack enough for a few days. But in Newcastle-on-Tyre he’s handed to the military, then Huyton, and Ramsey, before being put on a ship for Canada. 

As Kaufman writes in his autobiography, 

we boarded a train that headed eastward, once again destination unknown. It wound its way along the Gaspé peninsula and then veered south into New Brunswick before finally coming to a stop in the middle of a forest near a relief camp left over from the Great Depression. It was called Little River and was about twenty miles east of Fredericton…

Now Fred Kaufman’s story does not end in Little River — also known as Internment Camp B/70. He is eventually released, becomes a journalist, goes to law school, practices criminal defence, and is appointed to the Quebec Court of Appeal — where he sits for 18 years.

It is with this story that I begin my international humanitarian law (IHL) lecture on the laws of detention and internment. And for my students at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton, it is a story they quickly realize takes place in their backyard. 

The “Why” and “How” of University IHL Education

The obligation to teach civilians IHL features across the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (arts 47, 48, 127, 144), Additional Protocols of 1977 (arts 83(1), 19), and Customary Rules (rule 143). Of the many ways to discharge this obligation, universities can be “key agents of IHL dissemination.” In contexts where armed conflicts are ongoing and proximate, the relevance of such IHL courses is manifest. But what motivates faculties to offer IHL courses and students to enrol in them in further removed contexts?

There can, of course, be supply-side challenges for IHL education. Sharpe’s 2024 study of access to IHL courses at Canadian law schools, for instance, revealed that only about 25% of faculties offered IHL courses. A study of US law schools noted similar gaps. 

But there is also the prospect of a demand-side challenge. “Why should I, as an undergraduate law student, take IHL?” 

In my class, the question of “why” study IHL is answered, in part, through the question of “how” to study IHL and what I describe to my students as a place-based approach to IHL. At a small Atlantic Canadian law school it is about getting students to recognize — to paraphrase Stephen Toope — that IHL is “partly our law”, and see in IHL a field as relevant for students from Amsterdam as Amherst, New Brunswick.

On one level, this place-based approach is about celebrating our local international law personalities. I teach the intersection of IHL and international human rights law through the life and contributions of John Peters Humphrey. While famous internationally as the principal author of the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, my students are struck to discover that he was born just down the road in Hampton, New Brunswick. When we read The Corfu Channel Case for the principle of humanity, we do so through the eyes of Judge John E. Read. The only Canadian ever elected to the International Court of Justice, Read was from Halifax, Nova Scotia, our neighbouring province. On another level, it is about understanding our local relationships with the Canadian Armed Forces. Our faculty is about 30 kms from Canadian Support-Base Gagetown, Canada’s second largest military base.  

What interested me this year, though, was an idea to teach a place-based IHL in our local geography. Which is what led me to Fred Kaufman, Camp B/70, and a partnership with UNB’s Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society. 

Place-Based Pedagogy and Internment Camp B/70

Internment Camp B/70 was a repurposed 58-acre depression era relief camp. In WWII, 711 Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria — like Fred Kaufman — were interned there. Thereafter, the camp held German and Italian merchant marines, among others. Situated in the rural community of Ripples, New Brunswick, it is a short drive from my faculty. 

Thinking about our proximity to Camp B/70, Dr. Cindy Brown and Dr. Lee Windsor of the Gregg Centre, and I developed a program on the law and history of detention and internment. The program focused on the experiences of internment at that site, and it was offered to both law and history students. 

We begin the day at the law faculty with a general lecture on the laws of detention and internment. This lecture is a typical introduction to this area of law — moving from the Lieber Code and 1907 Hague Convention to the 1929 Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949. But it is also a lecture anchored in our context. 

Taking the liberty of looking at a WWII era camp through GCIII, we consider safeguards related to quarters (art 25), clothing (art 27), medical attention (art 30), intellectual and recreational pursuits (art 38), and working pay (art 62). These articles are brought to life with artefacts like the blue denim jacket of internees, photos of Camp quarters, and stories of payments for cutting down trees (Kaufman noted receiving 20 cents a day for this work). We even consider rules on escapes (arts 91, 92) with the story of a prison break foiled by a circus-performing cat.  

The lecture also lets students consider similarities, ambiguities, and tensions between the civilian and combatant internment regimes. “If these Jewish internees were refugees from Nazi oppression” asks one student “why were they treated as prisoners of war?”. Moving beyond the categories of the GCs, students thus question how these laws were interpreted and applied.    

From the law faculty, we walk across campus to the Gregg Centre. Law students chat to history students, surprised by different elements that struck them in the lecture. Entering the library, the students are met with a long table covered in photos, government memos related to the Camp, and internee journals. The students move through the materials at their own pace — glancing at some documents, dwelling on others, and stopping to discuss what they have found. After watching a grainy clip of the Camp as it had been, the Gregg Centre’s work-study student Jana Salam shares her experience of locating these artefacts in the nearby provincial archive. Engaging with these materials, the students ultimately encounter the government officials making decisions about the laws of internment, the guards enforcing those laws, and the internees living within those laws.    

Leaving the library, students are given copies of Henry Kreisel’s journal, another internee. One student reads, 

My knees shaking, I […] was taken upstairs to the office of the assistant general manager. Two men in raincoats were waiting. The assistant general manager stood behind the desk. He had a sombre look, but I remember him speaking kindly. These gentlemen, he said, were detectives who had come to fetch me. The room began to sway. I could not find my voice. My throat seemed parched. What had I done? Then one of the detectives said that all aliens were being interned for a brief period. 

We drive out to Camp B/70. Arriving, another student reads,

After [a] 24 hours [j]ourney we reach Camp “B” in New-Brunswick near Fredericton. It looks terrible at first sight. The barracks are not ready yet. We are surrounded by woods. 

Kreisel continues as our guide through the overgrowth of Camp B/70. Students read further excerpts at markers indicating the former mess hall or sports equipment hut. In between, they are given prompts for reflection. The air is crisp. Pine needles crunch underfoot. 

Back at campus, we gather around boxes of pizza to reflect on the day. The tone is relaxed, the conversation informal. Students chat about the lecture, weekend plans, the field visit, and what they will do after graduating.   

The Theory Behind this Approach

Contextual approaches to legal education are not new. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, Warwick’s law school considered how to centre legal education on “the integration of the practicing lawyer within [their] society”. Contextual approaches can help future lawyers become more locally connected, making their work more socially relevant. In international law, context “feels particularly urgent”. As international lawyers confront “the fragility of the field’s claims to universality”, context situates where, and in what circumstances, international law originated and developed. By extension, teaching rooted in context concretizes questions of whether, despite these origins, international law is “capable of challenging the status quo”. 

Contextual approaches can also combat the alienation felt by students learning a law of far-away peoples and far-removed places. This insight from the TWAIL scholarship and scholars like Al Attar considers the students marginalized by a predominantly Eurocentric approach to teaching international law. But contextual approaches are also promising for law students in the Global North at more socio-economically diverse, regional faculties of law.  Where I teach, I want my students to know that a life in international law does not only begin in New York, London, Geneva, or Cambridge. 

But how can one ensure that local case studies do not become “ornamental or supplementary”? How can a local IHL history be integral to a place-based study of the discipline, and foundational to locally inspired critiques thereof? We tried to address these issues in our program through experiential and interdisciplinary methods. 

Numerous experiential approaches have showcased the value of ‘learning [IHL] by doing’. Giving students clinical opportunities — like research, litigation support, and simulations — can help develop hard lawyering skills, and increase student investment in promoting IHL. Integrating video games into IHL courses can force students to engage more actively with the law. Moot competitions can impact students’ outlooks, sensibilities, and worldviews. And object-based learning can offer “portals” into spatial and temporal dimensions of IHL.            

Beyond mere participation, experiential learning balances experience with underlying content, fosters reflection, and sparks emotional connection. In a field of practice that demands “so much more of [future practitioners] than legal finesse”, this last element is particularly important. 

Experiential learning is also often interconnected with, if not rooted in, interdisciplinary learning. Experiencing a practice area often raises issues outside the compartments of one discipline. Interdisciplinary learning can thus highlight disciplinary silences and contradictions, allowing students to question their own discipline through reference to others. Law students, for instance, might ask about issues and perspectives beyond IHL’s reading of armed conflicts. 

Of the many disciplines that can be put in conversation with IHL, history is particularly well-suited for contextualizing an inquiry. In recent years, a growing history scholarship has situated the contingent, contested, and relatively new nature of IHL.  

More precisely in New Brunswick, history allows our students to engage with the local life of international law. How did the laws of internment impact the lives of people a short drive from our faculty? What are the local legacies of these experiences? From walking through Camp B/70 to reflecting on internees’ journals, history embeds us in the local context of internment. 

Conclusion 

Fred Kaufman passed away in December 2023. After his time on the bench, he led Royal Commissions investigating wrongful convictions and reviewed reports of abuse against institutionalized persons. In 2012, he even returned to New Brunswick, receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws in the province where he had once been interned. During the ceremony, the orator said “[o]ne cannot help but wonder if being incarcerated without cause himself helped motivate Fred to undertake such causes.”

Telling the stories of Fred Kaufman and Camp B/70 places IHL in our locality. For some students, this proximity is a pedagogical lightbulb. If the future of IHL depends (to paraphrase Kaufman), on the way humanitarian lawyers interpret their calling, such experiences can foster local interpretations of IHL, where students see this law as their own.